Twitter has truly developed into a global phenomenon, with the strongest adoption rates occurring outside its home market in the US, according to French research agency Semiocast.
The research firm states that only 30% of all tweets originate in the US, and that the proportion of messages written in English has fallen to 44%, from 50% six weeks ago.
Japan is the second largest nation of Twitterers with 15% of all messages, followed by Brazil (12%), Indonesia (10%), and the UK with (6%).
The Netherlands, Germany and France hold places in the top 13 nations – those with 1% or more of Twitter's messages.
Semiocast used semantic parsing tools to work out where messages originated during a week-long study involving analysis of 13.5 million tweets.
Only 0.5% of tweets have been geotagged, a service Twitter only offers to US users, but which some third-party applications can also provide.