Why Chinese is ideal for micro-blogging

CHINESE is ideal for micro-blogs, which typically restrict messages to 140 symbols: most messages do not even reach that limit. Arabic requires a little more space, but written Arabic routinely omits vowels anyway. Arabic tweets mushroomed last year, though thanks to the uprisings across the Middle East rather than to its linguistic properties. It is now the eighth most-used language on Twitter with over 2m public tweets every day. Romance tongues, among others, generally tend to be more verbose, as the chart below shows. So Spanish and Portuguese, the two most frequent European languages in the Twitterverse after English, have tricks to reduce the number of characters. Brazilians use “abs” for abraços (hugs) and “bjs” for beijos (kisses); Spanish speakers need never use personal pronouns (“I go” is denoted by the verb alone: voy). Some people use English to avoid censorship. Micro-bloggers on Sina Weibo (where messages containing some characters are automatically blocked) wrote “Bo” in the Roman alphabet in order to comment freely about Bo Xilai, a purged party chief.