Three data scientists, James Cheshire, Ed Manley, and John Barratt, have analyzed around 8 million tweets sent from New York City to create an interactive language map of the New York Metro area. Some of the data is less than surprising. Midtown Manhattan appears to have an even blending of every language and the vast majority of non-English tweets, around 228,000, were sent in Spanish. Areas that have had an ethnic identity for decades, like the Russian community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, are clearly represented on the map. One of the most surprising findings, however, is the prominence of Portuguese tweets. Even though Portuguese is the second most tweeted foreign language, at about one fifth the number of Spanish, there doesn't seem to be a concentrated population anywhere in the city, except for a small cluster in Newark, NJ.

Drill down on the data at ny.spatial.ly.