• TechCrunch, Wednesday, February 24, 2010 2:03 PM

New research may explain why so many consumers don't "get" Twitter, and its microblogging ways. It turns out only about half of the tweets posted on the service are in English, according to Paris-based firm Semiocas, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, which performed a semantic and quantitative study of Twitter based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets.

Curiously, that number is down a full 25% from last year, even though the company is based in the U.S. and has more users and momentum in English-speaking countries than anywhere else on the planet. Furthermore, Semiocast forecasts that its share will grow thinner in the future, as Twitter becomes more internationalized, and its pervasiveness spreads to Asia and Latin-America. Presently, the top 5 languages used on Twitter are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish.

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