NEW YORK—Four researchers and mappers have taken tweets sent from the city over the past three years and mapped them based on location and different languages.
English comes in the highest—over 8 million—with Spanish and Portuguese the second and third most used languages for tweets sent from the New York City area. Most tweets come from Manhattan, but most tweets in a language other than English come from areas outside Manhattan, including from South Brooklyn (including Coney Island); Jackson Heights, Queens; and Liberty Island, home to the Statue of Liberty.
“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),” writes James Cheshire, a lecturer at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. “You can also spot international clusters on Liberty Island and Ellis Island and if you look carefully the tracks of ferry boats.”
The 8.5 million tweets are from between Jan. 2010 and Feb. 2013. English is about 95 percent of all tweets sent; Spanish, the second most used language, is about 2.7 percent of the tweets.
Here’s a full list of the languages.
The map follows a similar model to one the researchers did for London.
