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92.5 percent of tweets are sent in English, but other top languages include Spanish, French, Turkish and Arabic
It’s long been hailed as one of the great international cities, but now London’s linguistic diversity has been mapped — thanks to Twitter.
This color-coded graphic pinpoints the location and language of tweets sent from the British capital and shows how linguistic groups are clustered in the city’s various districts.
The revealing map is the work of University College London PhD student Ed Manley and James Cheshire, a lecturer at UCL’s Centre of Advanced Spatial Analysis.
Using an open-source website language detector, the pair detected the predominant language used in 3.3 million GPS-enabled tweets sent over the summer 2012.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, 92.5 percent of the tweets were sent in English, but the researchers detected a total of 66 languages among the data including tongues as esoteric as Haitian Creole, Basque and even Swahili.
Other interesting revelations from the map
- The city’s beating heart: Most of London’s linguistic diversity is situated in the city centre, but includes multilingual hot spots like the Olympic Park and a bizarre concentration of French speakers in Lewisham, which is shown in the bottom right corner of the map
- The northern part of the city has a higher concentration of Turkish tweets, shown in blue
- Arabic tweets – appropriately in green – are most common around Edgware Road
- Parts of the West End show pockets of Russian tweets in pink
Professor Cheshire had this to say on his blog: “The geography of the French tweets (red) is perhaps most surprising as they appear to exist in high density pockets around the centre and don’t stand out in South Kensington (an area with the Institut Francais, a French High School and the French Embassy). It may be that as a proportion of tweeters in this area, they are small so they don’t stand out, or it could be that there are prolific tweeters (or bots) in the highly concentrated areas.”
Mr Manley stated that the project revealed a few matches but “a lot of the time it didn’t actually match in the same volume as we expected.” On his blog, he points out that languages he had expected to feature prominently such as Bengali and Somali barely appear on the map.
“Either people only tweet in English, or usage of Twitter varies significantly among language groups in London,” he speculated.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2222959/Twitter-map-London-shows-linguistic-diversity-truly-international-city.html#ixzz2QHgNEwq8
