Only 50% of Twitter Messages Are In English
Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has performed a semantic and quantitative study of Twitter based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets.
Turns out roughly half the tweets posted on the micro-sharing service are in English, down 25% from last year, even though the company is based in the U.S. and has more users and momentum in English-speaking countries than anywhere else on the planet. The analysis further showed that the top 5 languages used on Twitter are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish.
Semiocast says the study was conducted on messages gathered over a period of 48 hours, from February 8 to February 10, with the sole aim of determining which languages were most often used on Twitter. The messages were processed with the company’s own analysis tools, which it says can identify the language used in short messages for some 41 languages, including Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Tamil, etc.
Full article TechCrunch, by Robin Wauters Feb 24, 2010
Tags: diversity, internet, language