A recent report released by a Paris-based web intelligence firm Semiocast revealed that half of messages shared on Twitter are not in English, in a study of 2.8 million tweets. The most prominent Asian languages used to communicate on Twitter are Japanese and Malay. The analysis ranks English top while Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish followed suit amongst the 41 languages found.

Methodology

The study was conducted on tweets sent out over a period of 3 days, from February 8 to February 10, 2010 to determine Twitter’s most used language ranking. Through the analysis tools that Semiocast has, they managed to identify the languages used in short messages among 41 languages in the major writing systems.

A graph from the report represents the data gathered by Semiocast:

Results

Even though English is still the most used language on Twitter, this is a decline from the two-third share they had in the first half of 2009. Probably, in the future, English’s share would drop even further as the dominant language on Twitter as the growth from non-English speaking countries picks up.

Japanese is a clear second with 14% of tweets which is a testament to Twitter’s popularity in Japan and with that, confirms Japan as the first milestone of Twitter’s international development.

The number of Malay tweets reaching 6% is however not surprising as the research combines both the Bahasa languages in Indonesia and Malaysia together. This meant that about 3 million messages are exchanged in Malay-related languages daily on Twitter.

Conclusion

We should not forget the Chinese, where in the report that it makes up about 0.65% of the messages on Twitter, that Twitter is blocked in China. Imagine the number of Chinese-based tweets if China hadn’t block Twitter; it’ll probably be even more than Japanese tweets.

On top of that, these numbers are only a 3 day analysis of Twitter which I am very sure is not a full representative of the messages exchanged on Twitter. Also, there are people who tend to tweet more or lesser during the weekends which are not factored in the analysis.

However so, the findings are interesting.

Do you tweet in languages other than English? If so, what is it? We look forward to all of your comments.

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