Language, Twitter and Academic Conferences

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 interact more with different lingua groups. Finally, we also found higher interaction between people tweeting in different languages. These results suggest a relation between the number of languages a user speaks and their interaction dynamics in online communities.