A survey of a "month in the life of Twitter" has been mapped to show the distribution of languages used in tweets around the world.During the huge month-long survey, 1.5bn tweets were streamed from 71.3m unique users by creator Kalev Leetaru. Leetaru used the Twitter 'decahose', a feed of 10 percent of all tweets not available to the general public.
Of the tweets surveyed, 3 per cent contained geo-location data and were mapped by Leetaru and colour co-ordinated by language. According to his survey, 38 per cent of all tweets are sent in English. Second was Spanish with 11 per cent, third Portuguese wth 6 per cent.
Western European countries are dominated by tweeting in their own languages, with neatly defined colour boundaries shown on the map. Far less internet penetration in Eastern Euopean countries results in a much sparser and more varied distribution.
Predictably, Africa shows very sparse Twitter activity, with a significant use of English in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana. France's influence is visible in the Northern African countries, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
The UK and the US are dominated by English of course, but both show a scattering of other languages throughout the country. A filtered version of the map showing just English language tweets shows that English is still spoken widely in nearly every country, especially in Western Europe, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The map reinforces the extent to which the country with the world's biggest population and world's most internet users is absent from the social network. China, where Twitter is banned in favour of the country's own tightly controlled Weibo, appears on the map as a giant blackspot.
Twitter users in China use advanced VPNs and often change their identified location, Leetaru points out, which would throw off the image. The notoriously secretive state of North Korea also appears completely black.
The data for the map was collected between October 23 and November 30, 2012.
Of the tweets surveyed, 3 per cent contained geo-location data and were mapped by Leetaru and colour co-ordinated by language. According to his survey, 38 per cent of all tweets are sent in English. Second was Spanish with 11 per cent, third Portuguese wth 6 per cent.
Western European countries are dominated by tweeting in their own languages, with neatly defined colour boundaries shown on the map. Far less internet penetration in Eastern Euopean countries results in a much sparser and more varied distribution.
Predictably, Africa shows very sparse Twitter activity, with a significant use of English in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana. France's influence is visible in the Northern African countries, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
The UK and the US are dominated by English of course, but both show a scattering of other languages throughout the country. A filtered version of the map showing just English language tweets shows that English is still spoken widely in nearly every country, especially in Western Europe, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The map reinforces the extent to which the country with the world's biggest population and world's most internet users is absent from the social network. China, where Twitter is banned in favour of the country's own tightly controlled Weibo, appears on the map as a giant blackspot.
Twitter users in China use advanced VPNs and often change their identified location, Leetaru points out, which would throw off the image. The notoriously secretive state of North Korea also appears completely black.
The data for the map was collected between October 23 and November 30, 2012.
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