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Twitter Tongues is a neon universe-like visualization of language supernovas tweeted in New York City and London – though, London is less supernova and more clusters of constellations. It’s amazing to see how much more integration there appears to be in London, with the exception of Arabic, whereas in New York there are very notable spatial distinctions in where languages are spoken. The creators explained,

Following the interest in our Twitter Tongues map for London, Ed Manley and I have teamed up with Trendsmap creator John Barratt to offer this snapshot of New York City’s Twitter languages. We have visualised the geography of about 8.5 million geo-located tweets collected between Jan 2010 and Feb 2013. Each tweet is marked by a slightly transparent dot coloured according to the language it was written in. Language was detected using Google’s translation tools. The map (click for interactive version courtesy of Oliver O’Brien) has the top ten languages plotted together and the one below takes the top 24 in turn (excluding English) and orders them by popularity. English (in grey above) is by far the most popular with Spanish (in blue above) taking the top spot amongst the other language groups.  Portuguese and Japanese take third and fourth respectively. 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). You can also spot international clusters on Liberty Island and Ellis Island and if you look carefully the tracks of ferry boats between them. Ed has written up some more in depth analysis of the data here.

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Originally posted on Texture Transcribed.