Language Matters In Twitter: A Large Scale Study

By Lichan Hong, Gregorio Convertino, Ed H. Chi. 2011

256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite the widespread adoption of Twitter internationally, little research has investigated the differences among users of different languages. In prior research, the natural tendency has been to assume that the behaviors of English users generalize to other language users. We studied 62 million tweets collected over a four-week period and found that more than 100 languages were used. Only half of the tweets were in English (51%). Other popular languages including Japanese, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Spanish together accounted for 39% of the tweets. Examining users of the top 10 languages, we discovered cross-language differences in adoption of features such as URLs, hashtags, mentions, replies, and retweets. We discuss our work’s implications for research on large-scale social systems and design of cross-cultural communication tools.

Subfields: Communication, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Human-Computer Interaction

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Citations in the corpus

Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “For instance, users of diﬀerent countries tend to use Twitter diﬀerently—Germans tend to use hashtags more often (suggesting a focus on information sharing), while Koreans tend to reply more often to each other (suggesting a focus on conversations) (Hong et al., 2011).”
What to Expect When the Unexpected Happens: Social Media Communications Across Crises (2015, background): “Language and cultural differences could also be included as explicit crisis dimensions [20, 37], together with temporal factors.”
Code Mixing: A Challenge for Language Identification in the Language of Social Media (2014, methodology): “In this paper, we describe our work in progress on the problem of automatic language identification for the language of social media.”
Comparing Events Coverage in Online News and Social Media: The Case of Climate Change (2015, background): “Comparative research (Esser and Hanitzsch 2012) of Twitter communications includes studies on hashtag lifecycles (Lehmann et al. 2012), usage across users of different languages (Hong, Convertino, and Chi 2011), or food consumption (Abbar, Mejova, and Weber 2015).”
The Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms (2012, background): “In particular, the possibility of using mobile-enabled microblogging platforms, such as Twitter, as monitors of public opinion, social movements and as tools for the mapping of social communities has generated much interest in the literature [7–14].”
Where in the World Are You? Geolocation and Language Identification in Twitter* (2013, methodology): “Hong, Convertino, and Chi (2011) used two automated tools to determine the language of a tweet—LingPipe and the Google Language application programming interface (API)—whereas Semiocast (2010) used an internal proprietary tool.”
Cultural Dimensions in Twitter: Time, Individualism and Power (2013, result): “This result matches that of a previous study on microblogs: German tweets received the least number of mentions out of the 10 most common languages in Twitter (Hong, Convertino, and Chi 2011).”