Sci/Tech

Twitter is available in the Basque language as of today after volunteers translating Basque finished the translation required.

Last May, Twitter opened the Translation Center to Basque language. Translators were also required for other five languages that included Afrikaans, Catalan, Czech, Greek and Ukrainian. Today, Twitter is available in 28 languages, thanks in large part to a community of nearly half a million translators around the world.

Twitter has become "a home for minority language communities". The website Indigenous Tweets, created by computational linguistics professor Kevin Patrick Scannell, features of list of 70 minority languages, ranging from "better-known tongues" such as Haitian Creole and the Basque language Euskera to Australian indigenous language Gamilaraay.

Basque language is the second most tweeted minority language on Twitter. More than 13000 Twitter account holders post their tweets mostly in Basque, second only to the number of Haitian Creole tweeters, more than 14000 in total.

Twitter has over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 millions tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet." Twitter has been cited as an important factor in the Arab Spring and other political protests.