CorpComms Magazine

Tweets in Arabic have soared and more than two million are posted each day, up from just 99,000 per day this time last year, according to a recent study by social media monitoring firm Semiocast.

The volume of Arabic tweets has multiplied by 22 in the last year, and Arabic is now the eighth most popular language used on the social networking site.

English is the most popular language on Twitter with more than 70 million tweets posted each day, followed by Japanese and Portuguese in second and third place respectively. English tweets account for 39 per cent of total tweets, compared to more than 60 per cent back in 2009.

Tweets in Arabic represent just more 1.2 per cent of all public tweets, which add up to approximately 2.2 million each day.

Despite this, the site which is available in 17 different languages is not yet available in Arabic.

The increase in use of the site in the Middle East came at the same time as the recent uprising against Zine el Abidine Ben Ali's regime in Tunisia. Twitter users which included Egyptian Internet activist Wael Ghonim and Tunisian journalist Lina Ben Mhenni who were both praised for their real-time descriptions of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia respectively.

More than half a million Chinese tweets are posted on Twitter each day, despite the ban of the microblogging site in the country.

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