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Slightly over half of the homepages of the most visited websites on the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...
are in English, with varying amounts of information available in many other languages. Other top languages are Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, French, German and Japanese. 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.


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. 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. 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. According to a 2000 study, the international auxiliary language
Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communic ...
ranked 40 out of all languages in search engine queries, also ranking 27 out of all languages that rely on the
Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...
.


Content languages for websites

W3Techs estimated percentages of the top 10 million websites on the World Wide Web using various content languages as of January 1, 2023: 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 Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...
, 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). As a consequence, the figures show a significantly higher percentage for many languages (especially for English) as compared to the figures for all websites.''An alternative approach to produce indicators of languages in the Internet''
Pimienta, Daniel, June 2017 The figures for all websites are unknown, but some sources estimate below 50 percent for English; see for instance, Towards a multilingual cyberspace and the 2009 UNESCO report. Icelandic is among, or the least, used national language on the internet, while
Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
has fewer words on the internet.


Content languages on YouTube

Of the top 250
YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
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%. YouTube is available in over 80 languages with more than a hundred different local versions. Of those popular YouTube channels that posted a video in the first week of
2019 File:2019 collage v1.png, From top left, clockwise: Hong Kong protests turn to widespread riots and civil disobedience; House of Representatives votes to adopt articles of impeachment against Donald Trump; CRISPR gene editing first used to experim ...
, just over half contained some content in a language other than English.


Internet users by language

InternetWorldStats estimates of the number of Internet users by language as of March 31, 2020:"Number of Internet Users by Language"
, ''Internet World Stats'', Miniwatts Marketing Group, 31 March 2020, accessed 10 May 2020


Wikipedia page views by language

Wikimedia The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
Statistics gives the number of page views of each edition of
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
by language.List of Wikipedias/Table2
, Wikimedia, read on January 4, 2021


See also

*
Computer recycling Computer recycling, electronic recycling or e-waste recycling is the disassembly and separation of components and raw materials of waste electronics. Although the procedures of re-use, donation and repair are not strictly recycling, these are oth ...
* Computer technology for developing areas *
English in computing The English language is sometimes described as the '' lingua franca'' of computing. In comparison to other sciences, where Latin and Greek are often the principal sources of vocabulary, computer science borrows more extensively from English ...
*
Global digital divide The global digital divide describes global disparities, primarily between developed and developing countries, in regards to access to computing and information resources such as the Internet and the opportunities derived from such access. As with ...
*
Great Firewall The Great Firewall (''GFW''; ) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected for ...
*
Internationalization and localization In computing, internationalization and localization (American) or internationalisation and localisation (British English), often abbreviated i18n and L10n, are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional peculiarities and ...
*
Internet in China China has been on the internet intermittently since May 1989 and on a permanent basis since 20 April 1994, although with limited access. In 2008, China became the country with the largest population on the Internet and, , has remained so. As ...
* Internet in Russia * Internet censorship and surveillance by country *
Language localisation Language localisation (or language localization) is the process of adapting a product's translation to a specific country or region. It is the second phase of a larger process of product translation and cultural adaptation (for specific countries ...
*
List of countries by number of broadband Internet subscriptions This article contains a sortable list of countries by number of broadband Internet subscriptions and penetration rates, using data compiled by the International Telecommunication Union. List The list includes figures for both fixed wired broad ...
*
List of countries by number of Internet hosts A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...
*
List of countries by number of Internet users Below is a sortable list of countries by number of Internet users, for 2020. Internet users are defined as persons who accessed the Internet in the last 12 months from any device, including mobile phones.The statistics for numbers of Internet ...
*
Multilingualism Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all ...
*
Rural internet Rural Internet describes the characteristics of Internet service in rural areas (also referred to as "the country" or "countryside"), which are settled places outside towns and cities. Inhabitants live in villages, hamlets, on farms and in other ...
*
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
*
Website localization Website localization is the process of adapting an existing website to local language and culture in the target market. It is the process of adapting a website into a different linguistic and cultural context— involving much more than the simple ...


References


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).

Daniel Sorid, ''New York Times'', 30 December 2008.
Statistical Survey Report on Internet Usage in China
China Internet Network Information Center (2009), English translation.

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 {{Portal bar, Language, Internet Internet-related lists Internet culture Population statistics
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...