Culture
London's Raucous Babble of Languages
Data engineers examined more than 3 million tweets to create this sprawling linguistic cartography.
Attention, London residents: If your Malay is feeling rusty and in need of conversational oil, try heading to the neighborhood just north of Kensington Gardens. That's where Austronesians are chatting up a storm, according to this fascinating map of London's languages.
The clamorous cartography is the result of nifty computer analysis by Ed Manley and James Cheshire, both students at the University College London. (You might recall Cheshire from his map of London last names.) They used a tweaked Google Chrome algorithm to examine more than 3 million tweets sent by London inhabitants this summer. By the end of their dogged data-sifting, they had detected more than 60 languages including Tamil, Maltese, Tibetan, Urdu and Afrikaans.