Exploring the World Languages in Twitter

Abstract

Online social networks play a vital role in spreading information in today's world. Interestingly, the spread of information is due to the existence of the underlying connectivity of the users. An important aspect in the propagation of information in a social network is the language of the connected users. Understanding the information propagation from the perspective of languages is of particular interest because we live in a world with a very diverse set of languages. This paper aims to explore the language networks that are formed as the basis of user interactions in Twitter (an online social network platform). Using Network Science approaches, we unveil the "Twitter language network" as a whole is a connected system of many different languages that acts as an enabler of information spread. The connected language structure arises due to the presence of many multilingual speakers. Our work also sheds light on the similarity of languages from a speaker-preference point of view.