Twitter reached its 20 billionth tweet last Sunday, says the BBC – but 99% of all Twitter users won’t be able to read it.

That’s because the landmark tweet was in Japanese, sent by Tokyo graphic designer GGGGGGo_Lets_Go as part of a longer game of ‘tweet tennis’ (otherwise known as a Twitter conversation).

While the Japanese only make up 0.71% of the (according to the last count) 75 million Twitterers worldwide, the country actually sends a whopping 14% of all tweets.

So why are the Japanese such prolific tweeters? It could be to do with their reputation (stereotype?) for being tech-savvy and preferring online communication to human interaction.

Or, more likely, it’s because you can say a whole lot more with 140 characters in Japanese than you can in English. For instance, in English the word ‘information’ takes 11 characters – in Japanese it takes two.

The same is true for Chinese (in fact, if it wasn’t for China’s internet censorship policy, Chinese tweets would probably outstrip every other country). For instance, in only 70 characters you could tweet an entire poem by the Tang Dynasty Poet Li Bai – you’d need 624 characters to send it in English!

In English, we’ve developed a form of ‘text speak’ to communicate information in fewer characters, dropping unnecessary qualifying words (e.g. ‘New iPad arrived – feels like Xmas’) and even creating abbreviations (only to be used when absolutely necessary, IMHO).

Other languages do it as well – for instance, the French are big fans of ‘text speak’, with abbreviations such as BJR for Bonjour, JTM for Je t’aime and my personal favourite, Koi 2 9 for ‘Quoi de neuf?’ (what’s up?).

Arabic as well has adapted to the digital age, with the development of a system informally called the Arabic Chat Alphabet, in which numbers are substituted for sounds and words which can’t be expressed using the Latin alphabet, such as substituting the number 3 for the sound ‘ع’ or ‘ayn’.

In fact, one of my favourite games is trying to decipher the tweets and status updates of Lebanese friends and acquaintances, as they tend to jumble up English, French and Arabic Chat Alphabet in the one 140 character message.

These Twitter language barriers could soon be a thing of the past, though, with the development of Social Translate, a Google Chrome extension that uses Google Translate to automatically translate tweets and Facebook status updates – a phenomenon I recently discussed on the Comment Central blog.

While these machine translation tools still have a long way to go towards being truly accurate – especially with Asian languages like Japanese and Chinese – they offer a tantalising glimpse of a future where all online content will be available in any language, with the only distinction being a hierarchy between content which has been machine translated, and flawless multilingual content which has been translated by professionals.

The question is, though, what lessons can we learn from the 20 billionth tweet?

Well, the most important thing is to be reminded that the web is a multinational, multilingual place, and it will only become more and more diverse as the internet becomes more and more global (a lesson we’re learning every day at Lingo24).

Hyper-localisation might not be the way forward for the news media, but for businesses it may well become a necessity – as GGGGGGo_Lets_Go shows, the online marketplace is a melting pot of many dialects.