May I suggest a more mundane reason: The average german word length may be longer than English so you can fit less words in a tweet, although this SE answer as some anecdotal evidence to the contrary. <a href="http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2998/do-most-languages-need-more-space-than-english" rel="nofollow">http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2998/do-most-lang...</a>