You might think that a map showing where people use different languages on Twitter wouldn't be very informative. Hopefully not many people will be surprised that there are a lot of French speakers in France and a lot of Italian speakers in Italy.
However the Languages on Twitter map is fascinating to explore. The map allows you to select to view just 'English', 'Spanish' or 'Other' on the map. If you view just English speakers on the map you get a real sense of how English is the lingua franca of Twitter. My guess is that there are a lot of non-native speakers who use English to be able to communicate with their followers around the world.
In comparison Spanish is spoken widely on Twitter in the Americas and in Europe but isn't spoken very much in rest of the world. It is a shame that you can't drill down and view 'other' languages individually on the map but they are color-coded so you can zoom in on individual cities and countries and get a sense of the other languages spoken on Twitter.
This is another one of those maps that only seems to work in Chrome.
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