Twitter: which language dominates the Twitterverse?

·18 May 2013

According to published research titled “Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat: The geography of Twitter”, Most tweets from popular social network, Twitter, are done in English with Spanish and Portuguese following.

The research was conducted by Kalev Leetaru, and tracked data running on Twitter Decahose – a feed of 10% of all tweets (about 2.8 terabytes worth of data), selected at random and delivered in real time – between October 23 and November 30, 2012.

The data covered over 1.5 billion tweets from 71.3 million unique users, though Only 3% of the tweets contained geo-location to be mapped.

According to the data, 38% of the tweets were in English, while 11% were in Spanish and 6% in Portuguese.

Language Table

The coloured map, depicting languages by region, shows that – unsurprisingly – countries tend to tweet in their native languages, though the English-only map shows how widespread the English language is on the social network.

Global Language map (click to enlarge)

English only map (click to enlarge)

“Most countries show strong homogeneity with a single language in predominate use and small isolated pockets of other languages,” the research paper said.

“However, the region between Germany and Greece is extremely multilingual with Hungary and Serbia in particular having no single language that appears to dominate, while Lebanon, Israel, and the West Bank also have a very strong mix of languages.”

The paper notes that Africa shows very sparse Twitter usage with a sizable English population centered primarily in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, with France’s influence visible, especially in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

The full paper can be found here.