These Maps Show The Amazing Diversity Of Languages In New York City
Twitter Tongues/Cheshire, Manley, O'Brien, Barratt
There are dozens of different languages spoken in New York City, but what languages are people tweeting in?James Cheshire, Ed Manley, and Oliver O'brien from University College London, teamed up with John Barratt, the creator of Trendsmap, to create this awesome interactive map of the languages people tweet in, in New York City.
According to Cheshire's blog, the creators analyzed 8.5 million tweets around New York City from January 2010 to February 2013. They used Google's chromium compact language detector to determine the language of each tweet. The top 10 languages are plotted together on the map.
The map lets you zoom in and out and see how the top 10 tweet languages are spread across the city.
English is by far the most popular, but it's plotted in gray so it's easy to see the other languages. You can see that midtown Manhattan is unsurprisingly the most diverse.
Twitter Tongues/Cheshire, Manley, O'Brien, Barratt
But if you zoom in on JFK International airport, you can see a pocket with lots of different languages represented as people enter and leave the city from around the world:Twitter Tongues/Cheshire, Manley, O'Brien, Barratt
After a more in-depth analysis of the tweets they collected, the creators of the map found that Brighton Beach in south Brooklyn has a high concentration of Russian (yellow):Twitter Tongues/Cheshire, Manley, O'Brien, Barratt
The Bronx has a high concentration of Spanish (blue):Twitter Tongues/Cheshire, Manley, O'Brien, Barratt
And on the west side toward New Jersey there is a high concentration of Portuguese (red).Twitter Tongues/Cheshire, Manley, O'Brien, Barratt
The same team also made one of these maps for London if you're curious what languages people are tweeting in there.