I had been wanting to make this for a while before finding out on Saturday that Mike McCandless had extracted Chrome's open-source language detector into a standalone library, which suddenly made it much more practical.
There are a lot of near-identical colors for different languages because I was optimizing for maximum distinguishability of languages used near each other rather than for global uniqueness. The exception is English, which is in gray because it is so common almost everywhere that it threw off the process of choosing the other colors.
Nathan pointed out an error in the language labels. Fixed now.
Data from the Twitter streaming API, May 14-October 20, 2011.
onesevenone, Max Friedrich Hartmann, Simon Oud, webchick, and 214 other people added this photo to their favorites.
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El Marc Di Palmer Culom 11 months ago | reply
good job! One thing, how Balearics and Valencia does not speak Catalan?I understood that yes .. :::))) it`s very interesting..
El Marc Di Palmer Culom 11 months ago | reply
Bon treball! Una coseta, les Illes Balears i el País Valencià no parlen el català?!?
Tenia entès que sí :::)))
El Marc Di Palmer Culom 11 months ago | reply
buen trabajo! Una cosa, en las Islas Baleares y Valencia no hablan el catalán?!?
Me pensaba que si lo hablaban.. :::)))
martidelx 11 months ago | reply
Marc di Palmer. Actually the grren on this map is north of Barcelona and Inland Catalonia. This would mean that Southern Catalonia, the Valencian Country and the Balearic Island have more Spanish than Catalonian tweets. In bilingual areas it would be great to know the percentage of tweets is each language. It may not be possible on the map but the figures must exist... Acutally there is a mixture of green and red for Barcelona and you find green dots on some of the Valencian area (for example: Marina Alta around Denia) way south of Catalonia...