Languages used on the Internet

Content languages used for websites
English Russian German Spanish French Chinese Japanese Portuguese Polish Italian Turkish Arabic
Source: W3Techs, 24 March 2013

Languages used on the Internet provides a compilation of information on the number of Internet users and the number of Web sites on the Internet by language.

Languages used

Most web pages on the Internet are in English. A study made by W3Techs shows that as of December 2011 more than 56% of all websites use English as their content language. Other top languages which are used at least in 2% of websites are German, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, French, Italian and Portuguese. Note that those figures account for the one million web sites (e.g. 0.27% of the total web sites according to figures of Dec. 2011) the most visited, according to Alexa.com, and language is identified using only the home page of the sites in most of the cases. As a consequence those figures offer a significantly higher percentage for many languages (especially for English) as compared to the real figures for the whole universe (which remain unknown as of today but that some sources estimate below 50% for English - See for instance NET.LANG: Towards a multilingual cyberspace).

The use of English online has increased by around 281% over the past ten years, however this is far less than Spanish (743%), Chinese (1,277%), Russian (1,826%) or Arabic (showing a growth of 2,501% over the same period). The foreign language internet is rapidly expanding, with English being used by only 27% of users worldwide.

A study on the presence of Romance languages on the Internet, published by the Latin Union in collaboration with FUNREDES, showed that as of November 2007, 45% of the webpages were written in English, 7.8% in Spanish, 4.41% in French, 2.66% in Italian, 1.39% in Portuguese, 0.28% in Romanian and 5.9% in German.

Content languages for websites

Estimates of the percentages of Web sites using various content languages as of 26 April 2013:

Content languages for websites

Rank	Language	Percentage
1	English	54.9%
2	Russian	6.1%
3	German	5.3%
4	Spanish	4.8%
5	Chinese	4.4%
6	French	4.3%
7	Japanese	4.2%
8	Arabic	3.0%
9	Portuguese	2.3%
10	Polish	1.8%
11	Italian	1.5%
12	Turkish	1.4%
13	Dutch	1.1%
14	Persian	1.0%
15	Czech	0.6%
16	Swedish	0.6%
17	Indonesian	0.5%
18	Greek	0.4%
19	Romanian	0.4%
20	Vietnamese	0.4%
21	Hungarian	0.4%
22	Thai	0.3%
23	Danish	0.3%
24	Korean	0.3%
25	Slovak	0.2%
26	Finnish	0.2%
27	Bulgarian	0.2%
28	Norwegian	0.2%
29	Hebrew	0.2%
30	Lithuanian	0.1%
31	Croatian	0.1%
32	Serbian	0.1%
33	Slovenian	0.1%
34	Ukrainian	0.1%
35	Catalan	0.1%
36	Latvian	0.1%
37	Estonian	0.1%

All other languages are used in less than 0.1% of websites.

Internet users by language

Estimates of the number of Internet users by language as of 31 May 2011:

Percentage of Internet users by language

Rank	Language	Internet users
1	English	565,004,000	27%
2	Chinese	509,965,000	25%
3	Spanish	164,969,000	8%
4	Japanese	99,182,000	5%
5	Portuguese	82,587,000	4%
6	German	75,423,000	4%
7	Arabic	65,365,000	3%
8	French	59,779,000	3%
9	Russian	59,700,000	3%
10	Korean	39,440,000	2%
	Others	350,557,000	17%

See also

• 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
• English in computer science
• Global digital divide
• Rural Internet
• Computer recycling
• Computer technology for developing areas

External links

• Internet World Stats
  • Internet World Stats — Global Internet usage by language Latest stats
  • Internet World Stats — Internet users in the world by years
• European Travel Commission New Media Trend Watch
• Estimation of English and non-English Language Use on the WWW, 2000, web pages, 32 Latin character languages
• World GDP by Language
• Internet Users Map 2005
• CIA - The World Factbook
• Writing the Web’s Future in Many Languages - NYTimes.com
• English translation of the 23rd CNNIC Statistical Survey Report on Internet Usage in China
• List of CNNIC statistical reports
• 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
• FUNREDES Observatory of linguistic and cultural diversity on the Internet