Last week I twitted about using multiple languages in my Twitter feed. This blog entry is a short summary of pros and cons of multi-language twitting. Finally I have a suggestion for adding an optional language tag to your tweets.

The reason for raising the issue was that although most of my current followers are Danish, all of them understand English. On the other hand only a few of my non-Danish followers reads Danish.

So, what are my options?

1. If all my tweets are in Danish, I will rule out some of my current followers. At the same time a lot of potential followers will never know if I post anything of interest.
2. If all my tweets are in English, all my current followers and a lot of potential ones too will know what I tweet about.
3. Mixing the two languages would be annoying to some followers and require others to filter my tweets.
4. Tweet solely in Esperanto …

Although I would love to tweet in Esperanto, only option #2 and #3 are really worth looking at. If option #1 were of interest to me, this site wouldn’t be in English :-)

After getting a few responses from my followers, I decided to go for #2 because the majority of my current followers would benefit from it directly.

Proposal: Optional language tag
Part of Twitter’s success is its simplicity and ease of use. This is one of the reasons why people keep updating their Twitter-feed regularly. It doesn’t really take that much effort and everyone can use it as is.

You can write up to 140 chars, you can turn words into tags using the hash char (#) and you can address your tweet with an ampersand (@) followed by a username – that’s it.

With the risk of ruining the simplicity, I will suggest to add a language tag to tweets. This way it is possible to filter out tweets in different languages (given that your Twitter client supports filtering).

I propose the use of square brackets around a standard ISO 639-1 (alpha 2) language code, i.e. the same code as used in most common browsers. Please read RFC 4646 for best practise use of language codes.

Example:
@you: [en] Hi nopstrup, this is a really nice example. Could you please reply in Danish?
@nopstrup: [da] Lige over …

I’m not quite sure if it would be better to put the tag at the end, but actually it could work both ways.

Hopefully this kicks of a discussion :-)

Best wishes,
- Nikolaj