Quantifying and visualizing language diversity of Hong Kong using Twitter

Abstract

The wide penetration of location-aware mobile devices and location-based services renders the location-based social media as a reliable proxy to study the real-world geographic space. Language diversity is an important indicator of a city's internationalization level. People communicate using different languages in the cyberspace of social media as they do in the geographic space. The location-based social media therefore provides an innovative set of lens to map the language diversity and study the internationalization of cities. In the enclosed graphics, based on a collection of geo-tagged Twitter posts, we generated a fine resolution map of language diversity index in the area of Hong Kong to illustrate the potential of location-based social media in city research.