Twitter map reveals NYC’s lingual diversity

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British cartography connoisseurs Spatial Analysis have mapped some 8.5 million geo-tagged tweets in the metro area, nearly 1 million of which are foreign languages, helping visualize the city’s thriving lingual diversity.
twitter map 1
Compiling data over three years, the map reveals some expected trends, like Spanish being the most ubiquitous and common, and some other more revealing clusters, like the prevalence of Portuguese in the Ironbound area of Newark.

 

Splashes of color cross familiar outlines on the map, attesting to the city’s many and diverse international communities. Russian dominates Brighton Beach, Spanish the Bronx, Chinese in lower Manhattan, each dotted with pockets of Arabic, French, and Turkish. Meanwhile Midtown and JFK airport remain beacons of New York’s worldliness.

 

The map’s English tweets are almost indistinguishable from a road map, creating a grid of New York’s busiest streets. Altogether, 22 languages were identified.
Twitter map 2
Photos: Spatial Analysis