Twitter Map

My friend sent me an article about "London's Top Ten Languages" which has been worked out by looking at tweets sent within the city during summer 2012...

http://news.sky.com/story/1003113/twitter-map-shows-londons-top-10-languages

The article is very interesting, mainly the picture at the top which attracted my attention purely because it has lots of colours on it!... although it didn't actually make much sense to me until I read the actual article
The writer, Lulu Sinclair, explains how the map was formed by Ed Manley and James Cheshire, revealing a 'heat map' of languages used during the summer of 2012. This was obviously when the Olympics was going on, therefore a lot of different cultures and countries were bought together, and many people of different nationalities came across to the UK to watch the Games. 

English was the largest tweeting language, with over 3 million (93%) people using the language. The graph below (also seen on the article itself) shows the next top 10 languages that were commonly used through the summer:

As you can see, Spanish and French top the graph, most likely because they are close countries to the UK in terms of distance. 

The researchers found that an 'unknown' language also seemed to crop up a lot, which they later found out was English slang terms such as "lol," "ahhhhh" and "hahaha"- clearly these were some of the top phrases used during the Olympics?!

Have a read of the article and let me know what you think! 

Gemma x