Saturday 27 October 2012

Twitter Map Shows London's Top 10 Languages - Sky News

London 2012 is now famous for something else as well as the Olympic Games - the languages spoken via the Twittersphere.

A heat map of languages used during the summer reveals the top 10 languages used in London with by far the largest number of tweets - 3.3m or 92.5% - being sent in English.

Top 10 Twitter Languages in London
The top ten languages in London were sampled

The map, inspired by a one by self-named "map geek" Eric Fischer, was compiled for the social network site by James Cheshire, a lecturer at University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and Ed Manley, a PhD student at UCL.

"London is such a diverse place and we had so many visitors arriving over the Olympics that we thought it would be interesting to see where the groups clustered - if they did - or where they separated out," James Cheshire told Sky News.

"In some ways, the results weren't so surprising in the sense that London is an international city and we expected a wide range of languages.

"Edgware Road, for example, had a lot of Arabic tweets (shown on the map in green), as we'd expect and the tweets confirmed that certain groups seem to be more dominant in some areas than in others.

"But we were interested to see that French tweets (shown in red) are not just restricted to South Kensington - which we'd expected - but there are quite a large number towards Lewisham and further out to the west of the city."

Some groups were not as prevalent as the researchers imagined.

"The Chinese are very low down in the rankings at 25. That could just be for cultural reasons - perhaps they don't tweet much. Or it could be that they don't have their location switched on - in that case, we weren't able to log the tweets. Or it could be that they're tweeting in English."

One particularly surprising revelation came from a language from the Philippines deciphered as Tagalog which came up as the 7th most tweeted language.

The unknown language turned out to consist of English online colloquialisms such as 'hahahahaha', 'ahhhhhhh' and 'lololololol'.

"I don't know much about Tagalog but it sounds like a fun language," Ed Manley said in his blog, going on to explain the language was excluded from the analysis.

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