Languages used on the Internet

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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 are Spanish, Russian, Persian, French, German and Japanese.[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]

## Contents

* 1 Languages used
* 2 Usage statistics of content languages for websites
* 3 Content languages on YouTube
* 4 Internet users by language
* 5 Wikipedia page views by language
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 External links

## 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]

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.[4]

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.[5]

## Usage statistics of content languages for websites

W3Techs estimated percentages of the top 10 million websites on the World Wide Web using various content languages as of 21 January 2024:[1]

Rank | Language | 16 May 2023  | 21 January 2024

|
|
|

1 | English | 55.5%  | 51.7%
2 | Spanish | 5.0%  | 5.6%
4 | Russian | 4.9%  | 4.5%
3 | German | 4.3%  | 4.8%
6 | French | 4.4%  | 4.3%
5 | Japanese | 3.7%  | 4.4%
7 | Portuguese | 2.4%  | 3.2%
9 | Turkish | 2.3%  | 2.0%
8 | Italian | 1.9%  | 2.4%
12 | Persian | 1.8%  | 1.5%
10 | Dutch, Flemish | 1.5%  | 1.8%
11 | Polish | 1.4%  | 1.6%
13 | Chinese | 1.4%  | 1.3%
14 | Vietnamese | 1.3%  | 1.2%
15 | Indonesian | 0.7%  | 1.1%
16 | Czech | 0.7%  | 0.9%
17 | Korean | 0.7%  | 0.8%
18 | Arabic | 0.7%  | 0.6%
19 | Ukrainian | 0.6%  | 0.6%
20 | Greek | 0.5%  | 0.5%
21 | Hebrew | 0.5%  | 0.5%
22 | Swedish | 0.5%  | 0.5%
23 | Romanian | 0.4%  | 0.5%
24 | Hungarian | 0.4%  | 0.5%
25 | Thai | 0.4%  | 0.4%
26 | Danish | 0.3%  | 0.4%
27 | Slovak | 0.3%  | 0.3%
28 | Finnish | 0.3%  | 0.3%
29 | Bulgarian | 0.2%  | 0.2%
30 | Serbian | 0.2%  | 0.2%
31 | Norwegian (Bokmål) | 0.1%  | 0.2%
32 | Croatian | 0.1%  | 0.2%
33 | Lithuanian | 0.1%  | 0.2%
34 | Slovenian | 0.1%  | 0.1%
35 | Catalan, Valencian | 0.1%  | 0.1%
36 | Norwegian | 0.1%  | 0.1%
37 | Estonian | 0.1%  | 0.1%
38 | Latvian | 0.1%  | 0.1%
39 | Hindi | 0.1%  | 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.

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).[6] As a consequence, the figures show a significantly higher percentage for many languages (especially for English) as compared to the figures for all websites.[7] For all websites, estimates are between 20 and 50% for English.[8][2][9][10]

## Content languages on YouTube

Of the top 250 YouTube channels, 66% of the content is in English, 15% in Spanish, 7% in Portuguese, 5% in Hindi, 2% in Korean, while other languages make up 5%,[11] although other sources point to different percentages.[12][better source needed] YouTube is available in over 80 languages with more than a hundred different local versions.[13] Of those popular YouTube channels that posted a video in the first week of 2019, just over half contained some content in a language other than English.[14]

## Internet users by language

InternetWorldStats estimates of the number of Internet users by language as of March 31, 2020:[15]

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 | 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

Most popular edition of Wikipedia by country. In greyed-out countries, the "national-language" edition is usually the most popular, but there are exceptions.

Most viewed editions of Wikipedia over time

Most edited editions of Wikipedia over time

Wikimedia Statistics gives the number of page views of each edition of Wikipedia by language.[16]

Rank  | Language  | Daily page views
(average during the last year with
"Agent"="User"
on 4 January 2021)

|
|

1  | English | 257,705,129
2  | Japanese | 37,286,466
3  | Spanish | 37,018,505
4  | German | 30,844,175
5  | Russian | 26,358,126
6  | French | 24,392,611
7  | Italian | 18,622,198
8  | Chinese | 13,371,571
9  | Portuguese | 11,506,680
10  | Polish | 8,810,420
11  | Arabic | 7,333,102
12  | Persian | 5,672,829
13  | Indonesian | 5,385,401
14  | Dutch | 4,935,611
15  | Turkish | 3,382,454

## See also

* Computer technology for developing areas
* English in computing - English as lingua franca of programming and computer science
* Global digital divide
* Great Firewall
* Internationalization and localization - Process of making software accessible to people in different areas of the world
* Language localisation - Translating the text in a program to a different tongue
* Website localization - Website adaptation process
* Internet in China
* Internet in Russia
* Internet censorship and surveillance by country
* List of countries by number of broadband Internet subscriptions
* List of countries by number of Internet hosts
* List of countries by number of Internet users
* Multilingualism
* Rural internet - Internet service in rural areas
* Unicode - Character encoding standard

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Usage statistics of content languages for websites". https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Pimienta, Daniel; Prado, Daniel; Blanco, Álvaro (2009). "Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives". United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/twelve-years-of-measuring-linguistic-diversity-in-the-internet-balance-and-perspectives/. Retrieved 24 March 2015.
3. ↑ "What continents have the most indigenous languages?". 3 May 2019. https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/continents-most-indigenous-languages.
4. ↑ Rotaru, Alexandru. "The foreign language Internet is good for business". http://www.scottmclay.co.uk/foreign-language-internet-good-business/.
5. ↑ 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.
6. ↑ "Technologies Overview". W3Techs. http://w3techs.com/technologies.
7. ↑ An alternative approach to produce indicators of languages in the Internet Pimienta, Daniel, June 2017
8. ↑ Vannini, Laurent; Le Crosnier, Hervé (March 2012). "NET.LANG: Towards a multilingual cyberspace". Net.lang: réussir le cyberespace multilingue. Caen: C&F éd. ISBN 978-2-915825-08-4. http://net-lang.net/lang_en.
9. ↑ Pimienta, Daniel (2022). "Resource: Indicators on the Presence of Languages in Internet". Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-Resourced Languages (Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association): 83–91. https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigul-1.11.
10. ↑ Pimienta, Daniel; Blanco, Álvaro; de Oliveira, Gilvan Müller (2023). "The method behind the unprecedented production of indicators of the presence of languages in the Internet". Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics 8. doi:10.3389/frma.2023.1149347. ISSN 2504-0537. PMID 37273659.
11. ↑ Yang, Brian (2019). "6 Common Features Of Top 250 YouTube Channels". Twinword, Inc. https://www.twinword.com/blog/features-of-top-250-youtube-channels/.
12. ↑ Expert, Alan Spicer-YouTube Certified (2020-11-24). "Top Languages on YouTube [All The Stats! [Dominate YouTube with Multiple Languages]"] (in en-GB). https://alanspicer.com/top-languages-on-youtube/.
13. ↑ GMI Blogger (18 April 2022). "YouTube User Statistics 2022". Global Media Insight - Dubai Digital Interactive Agency. https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statistics/.
14. ↑ van Kessel, Patrick; Toor, Skye; Smith, Aaron (25 July 2019). "Popular YouTube channels produced a vast amount of content, much of it in languages other than English". Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/07/25/popular-youtube-channels-produced-a-vast-amount-of-content-much-of-it-in-languages-other-than-english/.
15. ↑ "Number of Internet Users by Language" , Internet World Stats, Miniwatts Marketing Group, 31 March 2020, accessed 10 May 2020
16. ↑ List of Wikipedias/Table2 , Wikimedia, read on January 4, 2021

## 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

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