Frank Jacobs- Big Think wrote:What a joy these maps are to behold. It’s as if someone took one of those composite satellite maps - you know, impossibly showing the whole world at night, the darkness broken by hubs and strings of artificial light (1) - and gave it the power of speech.
For the riot of colours on these maps correspond to the diversity of languages spoken, or rather: typed, on Twitter.
The link came to me from a Catalan activist to show that, in Catalunya, most Catalans tweet in Catalan rather than Spanish. Looking at Spain, the area around Barcelona has its fair share of Spanish, which I also observed on the ground a year ago.
What strikes me, when the world map is seen as a whole, is the monolingual nature of most of the US and Canada with a sliver of French at the St Lawrence. Then, there's the darkness of most of Africa, due to relative economic prosperity and internet penetration; and, that of Australia because most Australians live relatively near to the coasts for reasons of climate.
Frank Jacobs- Big Think wrote:... In relative terms, the world’s top tweeting nation are the Netherlands, with just over 22% of the Dutch online population using Twitter. The US, at 8%, is far behind Brazil (almost 22%), Venezuela (21%) and Indonesia (19%). So it’s a fair guess that a majority of the 200 million tweets generated every day are in languages other than English.
But which ones? Online language detection is possible due to Google’s open-sourcing of the CLD (Compact Language Detector) software embedded in its Chrome browser, which tells you in what language the web page you are visiting is written - and asks if you want it translated into another one, if it’s not your own.
A guy called Mike McCandless extracted the software, another one called Eric Fischer applied it to Twitter. And hey presto! ...
Of course, this kind of visual representation is biased towards twitter users and the majority of people in the world have more important things to do with their lives, and the internet (if they have access) than tweeting about them.
English is represented as gray. Why does Bermuda show so much Spanish? Could be a glitch?