Language, Twitter and Academic Conferences

TL;DR

This study analyzes multilingual interactions on Twitter during academic conferences, revealing that while English dominates, diverse language use influences interaction patterns and community integration.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on language diversity and interaction behaviors among conference scholars on Twitter over five years.

Findings

English is the most used language but many tweet in other languages.

English monolinguals tend to interact within their group.

Multilingual users show more diverse interactions.

Abstract

Using Twitter during academic conferences is a way of engaging and connecting an audience inherently multicultural by the nature of scientific collaboration. English is expected to be the lingua franca bridging the communication and integration between native speakers of different mother tongues. However, little research has been done to support this assumption. In this paper we analyzed how integrated language communities are by analyzing the scholars' tweets used in 26 Computer Science conferences over a time span of five years. We found that although English is the most popular language used to tweet during conferences, a significant proportion of people also tweet in other languages. In addition, people who tweet solely in English interact mostly within the same group (English monolinguals), while people who speak other languages tend to show a more diverse interaction with other lingua groups. Finally, we also found that the people who interact with other Twitter users show a more diverse language distribution, while people who do not interact mostly post tweets in a single language. These results suggest a relation between the number of languages a user speaks, which can affect the interaction dynamics of online communities.