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Map: The Multi-Lingual Tweets Of New York
By
Garth Johnston
Published Feb 21, 2013
Modified Feb 21, 2013
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Feb 21, 2013
Modified Feb 21, 2013
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If you ever wanted proof that New York City is a multilingual melting pot, we've got just the map just for you. James Cheshire, Ed Manley and friends have just dropped an awesome map/analysis of language use in tweets originating in the Big Apple. They even made an interactive version that turns the five boroughs into something of a pointillist dreamscape!
So what is this? What you see above is a map visualizing 8.5 million geo-located tweets from January 2010 through February 2013 color-coded by language (detected by Google Translate). What you'll notice is:
English (in grey above) is by far the most popular with Spanish (in blue above) taking the top spot amongst the other language groups. Portuguese and Japanese take third and fourth respectively. Midtown Manhattan and JFK International Airport have, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most linguistically diverse tweets whilst specific languages shine through in places such as Brighton Beach (Russian), the Bronx (Spanish) and towards Newark (Portuguese). You can also spot international clusters on Liberty Island and Ellis Island and if you look carefully the tracks of ferry boats between them.
Oh, you want to go deeper into the data set? No problem! Here's a fascinating set of specific maps broken down by single languages, which gives an interesting look at where certain language speakers are clustered. Note that those maps don't exactly match up with the city's own maps of non-English speakers in the city—but that shouldn't be too surprising as Twitter is still a young medium which many non-English speakers (as well as older people) in the city may not be using.
Wait, you want MORE data to look at? Still not a problem! Here is the complete list of tweets/languages used for the map (only four tweets in Bengali?) and over here Manley offers further analysis of the data. Who knew "tweet density" could be so interesting?
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