Languages used on the Internet

Slightly over half of the homepages of the most visited websites on the World Wide Web are in English, with varying amounts of information available in many other languages.[1][2] Other top languages, according to W3Techs, are Russian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Persian, French, Japanese and Portuguese.[1]

Of the more than 7,000 existing languages, only a few hundred are recognized as being in use for Web pages on the World Wide Web.[3]

Languages used

There is debate over the most-used languages on the Internet. A 2009 UNESCO report monitoring the languages of websites for 12 years, from 1996 to 2008, found a steady year-on-year decline in the percentage of webpages in English, from 75 percent in 1998 to 45 percent in 2005.[2] The authors found that English remained at 45 percent of content for 2005 to the end of the study but believe this was due to the bias of search engines indexing more English-language content rather than a true stabilization of the percentage of content in English on the World Wide Web.[2]

Ongoing monitoring by W3Techs showed that in March 2020, just over 59 percent of the most visited websites had English-language homepages.[1] Other top languages that are used at least in 2 percent of the one million most visited websites according to W3Techs are Russian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Persian, French, Japanese and Portuguese.

The figures from the W3Techs study are based on the one million most visited websites (i.e., approximately 0.27 percent of all websites according to December 2011 figures) as ranked by Alexa.com, and language is identified using only the home page of the sites in most cases (e.g., all of Wikipedia is based on the language detection of http://www.wikipedia.org).[4] As a consequence, the figures show a significantly higher percentage for many languages (especially for English) as compared to the figures for all websites.[5] The figures for all websites are unknown, but some sources estimate below 50 percent for English; see for instance, Towards a multilingual cyberspace[6] and the 2009 UNESCO report.[2]

The number of non-English web pages is rapidly expanding. The use of English online increased by around 281 percent from 2001 to 2011, a lower rate of growth than that of Spanish (743 percent), Chinese (1,277 percent), Russian (1,826 percent) or Arabic (2,501 percent) over the same period.[7]

According to a 2000 study, the international auxiliary language Esperanto ranked 40 out of all languages in search engine queries, also ranking 27 out of all languages that rely on the Latin script.[8]

Content languages for websites

W3Techs estimated percentages of the top 10 million websites on the World Wide Web using various content languages as of July 18, 2020:[1]

Rank	Language	Percentage
1	English	59.7%
2	Russian	8.7%
3	Spanish	4.0%
4	Turkish	3.2%
5	Persian	2.8%
6	French	2.7%
7	German	2.6%
8	Japanese	2.3%
9	Portuguese	2.0%
10	Vietnamese	1.5%
11	Chinese	1.5%
12	Arabic	0.9%
13	Italian	0.9%
14	Polish	0.8%
15	Greek	0.7%
16	Indonesian	0.7%
17	Dutch, Flemish	0.7%
18	Korean	0.6%
19	Thai	0.5%
20	Czech	0.4%
21	Ukrainian	0.4%
22	Hebrew	0.4%
23	Swedish	0.3%
24	Romanian	0.3%
25	Hungarian	0.2%
26	Danish	0.2%
27	Serbian	0.2%
28	Slovak	0.1%
29	Bulgarian	0.1%
30	Finnish	0.1%
31	Croatian	0.1%
32	Lithuanian	0.1%
33	Norwegian Bokmål	0.1%
34	Hindi	0.1%
35	Norwegian	0.1%
36	Slovenian	0.1%
37	Latvian	0.1%
38	Estonian	0.1%

All other languages are used in less than 0.1% of websites. Even including all languages, percentages may not sum to 100% because some websites contain multiple content languages.

Internet users by language

InternetWorldStats estimates of the number of Internet users by language as of March 31, 2020:[9]

Rank	Language	Internet users	Percentage
1	English	1,186,451,052	25.9%
2	Chinese	888,453,068	19.4%
3	Spanish	363,684,593	7.9%
4	Arabic	237,418,349	5.2%
5	Indonesian / Malaysian	198,029,815	4.3%
6	Portuguese	171,750,818	3.7%
7	French	151,733,611	3.3%
8	Japanese	118,626,672	2.6%
9	Russian	116,353,942	2.5%
10	German	92,525,427	2.0%
1-10	Top 10 languages	3,525,027,347	76.9%
-	Others	1,060,551,371	23.1%
Total		4,585,578,718	100%

Wikipedia page views by language

Wikimedia Statistics gives the number of page views of each edition of Wikipedia by language as of June 2020.[10]

Rank	Language	Page views (June 2020)
1	English	9,600,000,000
2	Japanese	1,400,000,000
3	Spanish	1,300,000,000
4	German	1,100,000,000
5	French	878,000,000
6	Russian	846,000,000
7	Italian	623,000,000
8	Chinese	572,000,000
9	Portuguese	420,000,000
10	Polish	311,000,000

See also

• Internationalization and localization
• Language localization
• Website localization
• List of countries by number of Internet users
• List of countries by number of broadband Internet users
• List of countries by number of Internet hosts
• Multilingualism
• English in computer science
• Global digital divide
• Rural Internet
• Unicode
• Computer recycling
• Computer technology for developing areas

References

1. "Usage statistics of content languages for websites". w3techs.com. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
2. Pimienta, Daniel, Prado, Daniel and Blanco, Álvaro (2009). "Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives". United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
3. "What continents have the most indigenous languages?". Ethnologue. 3 May 2019.
4. "Technologies Overview". W3Techs. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
5. An alternative approach to produce indicators of languages in the Internet Pimienta, Daniel, June 2017
6. NET.LANG: Towards a multilingual cyberspace Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine MAAYA (coord.), Laurent Vannini and Hervé le Crosnier (eds.), Maaya Network, C&F éditions, March 2012, 446 pp., ISBN 978-2-915825-08-4
7. Rotaru, Alexandru. "The foreign language Internet is good for business". Archived from the original on 7 April 2013. Retrieved 21 June 2011.
8. Grefenstette, Gregory; Nioche, Julien. "Estimation of English and non-English Language Use on the WWW". Proceedings of RIAO'2000, "Content-Based Multimedia Information Access", Paris, April 12–14, 2000, pp. 237-246.
9. "Number of Internet Users by Language", Internet World Stats, Miniwatts Marketing Group, 31 March 2020, accessed 10 May 2020
10. Monthly overview, Wikimedia Statistics, read on July 11th 2020

External links

• Internet World Users by Language, Internet World Stats.
• "Estimation of English and non-English Language Use on the WWW", Gregory Grefenstette and Julien Nioche, in Proceedings of RIAO'2000, Content-Based Multimedia Information Access, Paris, 12–14 April 2000, pp. 237–246.
• World GDP by Language 1975–2002, Mark Davis, Unicode Technical Note #13 (2003).
• "Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages", Daniel Sorid, New York Times, 30 December 2008.
• Statistical Survey Report on Internet Usage in China, China Internet Network Information Center (2009), English translation.
• List of CNNIC statistical reports, China Internet Network Information Center (1997-2010).
• Measuring Linguistic Diversity on the Internet, UNESCO (2006).
• Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet, UNESCO (2009).
• Language Observatory, Japan Science and Technology Agency (2012).
• Observatory of linguistic and cultural diversity on the Internet, FUNREDES/MAAYA