Half of the messages posted to Twitter during a 48-hour period this February were in English, down from two thirds in the first half of 2009.
Twitter language analysis points to worldwide growth
Half of the messages posted to Twitter during a 48-hour period this February were in English, down from two thirds in the first half of 2009.
French analysis firm Semiocast said: “English’s share should drop even further as the strongest growth for Twitter is expected to come from non-English speaking countries.”
Semiocast analysed Twitter traffic between February 8 and 10. While half of all tweets were in English, the next most common language was Japanese, accounting for 14% of content.
Portuguese is the third most common language, accounting for 9% of Tweets and reflecting the growing use of social networking in Brazil.
Spanish accounted for 4% of the total, driven by use of the microblogging site by the Hispanic community in the US.
The two southern European langagues are split by Malay-related languages, which accounted for 6% of the total. Semiocast suggested that Twitter’s partnership with leading mobile carriers in Malaysia and Indonesia accounted for the strong showing.
“Other languages” accounted for 17% of the total. Within this band, German accounted for less than 2% with French less than 1%.
Top languages on Twitter
> English: 50%
> Japanese: 14%
> Portuguese: 9%
> Malay: 6%
> Spanish: 4%
