  Using Twitter during academic conferences is a way of engaging and connecting
an audience inherently multicultural by the nature of scientific collaboration.
English is expected to be the lingua franca bridging the communication and
integration between native speakers of different mother tongues. However,
little research has been done to support this assumption. In this paper we
analyzed how integrated language communities are by analyzing the scholars'
tweets used in 26 Computer Science conferences over a time span of five years.
We found that although English is the most popular language used to tweet
during conferences, a significant proportion of people also tweet in other
languages. In addition, people who tweet solely in English interact mostly
within the same group (English monolinguals), while people who speak other
languages tend to show a more diverse interaction with other lingua groups.
Finally, we also found that the people who interact with other Twitter users
show a more diverse language distribution, while people who do not interact
mostly post tweets in a single language. These results suggest a relation
between the number of languages a user speaks, which can affect the interaction
dynamics of online communities.
