Paris-based Semiocast
has performed a semantic and quantitative study of 2.8 million tweets. The company found that roughly half the tweets posted on the micro-sharing service are in English, down 25% from last year. The top 5 languages used on Twitter are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish.
Japanese comes in second with 14% of messages, followed by Portuguese with 9% of all messages. Malay languages, including Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia, now represent the fourth most used language on Twitter, with 6% of messages. Spanish comes in fifth with 4% of all messages. The ranks six to eight are occupied by major European languages, namely Italian, Dutch and German, each accounting for about 1% to 2% of total messages. French represents a little less than 1% of total messages.
