Study reveals spike in Arabic tweeting

27 Nov 2011, 12:37 pm   -   Source: AAP
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The popularity of Twitter has soared in the Arab world, a study reveals, reflecting the key role of social networking in the "Arab Spring" revolutions.

The popularity of Twitter has soared in the Arab world over the past year, a study shows, reflecting the key role of the social networking site in the "Arab Spring" revolutions.

Online Twitter messages, or tweets, in Arabic rocketed from 99,000 a day in October 2010 to over two million last month, social media monitor Semiocast showed in its study of the most popular languages used on the popular site.

Arabic is now the eighth most popular language on the microblogging site, where users leave short messages of no more than 140 characters.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites were used to chronicle the recent uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa and mobilise support.

"With recent events, Twitter has grown exceptionally fast in the Middle East," the report said.

Prominent bloggers including Lina Ben Mhenni, a Tunisian journalist who described the uprising against Zine el Abidine Ben Ali's regime, and Google executive Wael Ghonim, who was a central inspiration to protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo, were praised for their "real time" depiction of events.

English remains the main language of Twitter, with over 70 million tweets posted daily.

But it now represents a considerably smaller percentage of the daily global number of tweets, dropping from over 60 per cent in 2009 to just under 40 per cent two years later.

Tweets in Japanese - the second most popular language on Twitter - account for 14.2 per cent of the daily total, down from 19 per cent a year ago.

In contrast the number of Thai tweets has multiplied by 470 per cent.

Around half a million Chinese tweets make it onto the site every day, despite a ban on Twitter in the country.

The study covered a sample of 5.6 billion tweets, or 10 per cent of tweets globally, collected between 1 July 2010 and 21 October 2011 in 61 languages.

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