Only 4% of messages on Twitter are in Spanish
Subtitle: Half the tweets on Twitter are in English
A study done by Semiocast (.pdf), reveled language usage on Twitter over a period of 48 hours in February, 2010.
The study found that most language used was English at 50% from English speaking countries and non-native English speaking users.
Other languages that were tallied – Japanese (14%), Portugese (9%), Malay (6%) – can be attributed directly to international outreach or social media popularity within that region.
Spanish came in 5th at 4% mostly from Spanish users who are in the US. It’s my belief that this reflects the preference of Hispanic social media users of English as their primary communication language and reflects the young, acculturating traits of Hispanics online. My only wonder if there’s any public usage stats on Twitter’s Spanish translation page.
The rest of the 17% was a combination of various languages each accounting for no more than 2%
Popularity: 5% [?]
