New York City Language Map

A map of geo-tagged tweets for various non-English languages in New York City. Blue = Spanish; Light Green = Korean; Fuchsia = Russian; Red = Portugese; Yellow = Japanese; Pink = Dutch; Grey = Danish; Coral = Indonesian.
Image Credit: Delia Mocanu et al. via the arXiv.

March 25, 2013

As Twitter's popularity has risen over the past several years, physicists and mathematicians have delved into the social network's rich datasets of geo-tagged information. At the American Physical Society's March Meeting last week, PhD student Delia Mocanu (Northeastern University) and her colleagues presented their work on geographically mapping tweets based on language.

In the image above, you can see where non-English tweets are originating throughout New York City. While Spanish seems to pervade the city, several well-known ethnic enclaves — such as the Russian-dominated Brighton Beach area — appear on the map.