Most popular languages on the Internet
1. English – 380
2. Chinese – 185
3. Spanish – 113
4. Japanese – 88
5. French – 64
6. German – 62
7. Portuguese – 51
8. Arabic – 46
9. Korean – 34
10. Italian – 33
This was based on Internet world statistics (millions of users) for the most popular languages on the Internet and accounts for 83% of Internet language usage; with the Chinese language and the Arabic language having large growth rates for the most popular languages on the Internet.
However, I can not believe these statistics on the most popular languages on the internet are correct. Why? Where is Russian? Russian is the 8th largest language in the world and 6th in terms of speakers and the Russians are very techy people, so are you telling me there are more Italians plugged into the Internet than Russians? And what do the Italians do on the Interent? Russian are world reknown software geeks. To have an Internet connection is not the same as having an influence or power on the interent or even to say its a popular language on the Internet. Its the times spent and what is done in this language that is more important.
My list on the most popular languages on the Internet or better yet the most powerful languages on the Internet based on world influence might be as follows:
My list of the most Popular languages on the Internet
1. English
2. Chinese
3. Russian
4. Spanish
5. Arabic
6. Japanese
7 French
8. German
9. Korean
10. Polish/Portuguese
This is my list of the most popular languages on the Internet.
10 responses to Most popular languages on the Internet
The Chinese population makes up 23% of the world population. It means that more than 2 billion people are speaking Mandarin. Since China is a very promising country for its economy power and Mandarin is an official language of the United Nations, a Mandarin speaking skill is surely a must-have in the future. You are lucky, and your Chinese is good. If you are interested in learning more about Mandarin, visit the website learnchinese. bj. cn
Chinese may become the number one language on the Internet, I am not sure this will depend on the growth rates of the English and Chinese speaking worlds.
The Russians may be techy people, and may have a large population, but what percentage of the population can afford to use the internet. It is still very much a luxury in many other parts of the world. Not only will you have to be able to afford a decent computer and access via an isp, but your country will have to have the infrastructure to support bringing it to the masses.
I’m not that clued up about Russian economics so, i’m not sure if this is the case, but it may well be.
Your right Russia is not the richest country in the world, but things have change a lot in the last 10 years in Russia. Moscow is the most expensive city in the world and has the most billionaires world, thanks to Russian oil and other factors. So even though development is uneven every Russian I know has a computer, and the Russians are all over Europe buying Europe up. But still they have many poor, most people live in small flats and have only one computer. I think the Russian language is held back not some much by money but a negative population growth. Thanks for the comment BTW on my most popular languages on the Internet.
Google translate now has Chinese and I am going to try to start surfing the Chinese internet, I am very curious what is being blogged about.
@Danny. You said “The Chinese population makes up 23% of the world population. It means that more than 2 billion people are speaking Mandarin”. No, that is not what it means.
I’ve long searched for more data regarding language on the internet. I don’t like the “number of users” approach because it assumes that the user will be speaking in just that language (even if they know and use multiple) and doesn’t say anything about what it is they’re contributing to the internet either. I’d love to see data taking into account things like number of pages in each language, blogging activity in each language, news sources etc. I found this study of Romance Languages on the internet very interesting (dtil.unilat.org/LI/2007/ro/resultados_ro.htm) but it’s in Romanian.
And also @Danny: your facts are slightly off because while the Chinese population does make up around 20% (actually I believe estimates from 2009 said it was 19.6% of world population), that’s actually still only 1.3 billion (they have an official population counter cpirc.org.cn/index.asp) and that is the population of China, not the population of Mandarin speakers specifically. Ethnologue puts the number of native Mandarin speakers at 845 million. I’d expect that speakers of other dialects would learn Mandarin as well but at most you’re still about a billion off. Mandarin is an important language at least and being a native English speaker I’m totally biased but I still think English goes farther on the internet right now.
Hi, we are busy translating parts of our content and think your list is pretty accurate. Hindi and possibly Bengali might also fight for a place there. CU
Hi. in defense of Russian language:
In Russian internet realm the percentage of trolls is far less than in English realm. I can tell it from my experience.
Sometimes when I can’t find some information thru a google search in english, I find it in russian sites.
The overall impression is: the Russians on the internet are intelligent, techy and most of the time helpfull people.
BTW: I’m not russian, I’m Azerbaijani. Russian is my second language, English is 4th
D
I consider we should be honest. English should be number 1 obviously and Spanish number 2, not Chinese. We all know Chinese is only spoken in China, at least 95% of those 185 reported above on the list. So the point is that Spanish is spoken in more than 21 countries including USA and most of those countries are democratic, Chine otherwise is a dictatorship with restrictions on Internet. So with such restrictions it cannot be number 2.
Leave a reply to Most popular languages on the Internet