English language dominates Twitter... for now

The number of tweets in English has dropped from two-thirds to half since last year, according to Paris-based Internet research firm, Semiocast.

by Helen Leggatt

Even though Twitter is U.S.-based the number of tweets in English have dropped. Now, according to semantic and quantitative studies of 2.8 million tweets by Semiocast, English is the language of just half of all tweets.

Messages were processed using Semiocast's own analysis tools which can identify some 41 languages including Tamil, Chinese, Greek, Korean and Hebrew. The top five languages used on Twitter turned out to be English (50%), Japanese (14%), Portugese (9%), Malay (6%) and Spanish (4%), reports TechCrunch.

In sixth to eighth place are major European languages, namely Italian, Dutch and German, each accounting for about 1% to 2% of total messages. French represents a little less than 1% of total messages.

Once the spread of Twitter reaches the four corners of the globe the number of tweets in English should begin to better represent the use of the language globally. Currently, English is spoken by 400 million people around the world, which ranks it below both Chinese and Spanish.

Tags: English, language, Twitter

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wowtr

it takes time and numbers to be able to tell which part of all spoken languages is spoken most. but one cannot expect to be the most spoken language when the the totale number of speakers is only small, which counts for the english language. in time chinese will outnumber all languages but this will take time and development and education.

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