English is the predominant language on the World Wide Web—content and English-language users—has fueled the rise of the web as a means of communication, information dissemination and entertainment. This article details statistics of Internet linguistic patterns and their impact. In considering which languages dominate, two statistics are considered: the first language of the users and the language of actual material posted on the web.
English speakers
Web user percentages usually focus on raw comparisons of the first language of those who access the web. Just as important is a consideration of second- and foreign-language users; i.e., the first language of a user does not necessarily reflect which language they regularly employ when using the web.
Native speakers
English-language users appear to be a plurality of web users, consistently cited as around one-third of the overall (near one billion). This reflects the relative affluence of English-speaking countries and high Internet penetration rates in them.
This lead may be eroding due mainly to a rapid increase of Chinese users, which broadly parallels China’s advance on other economic fronts. In fact, if first-language speakers are compared, Chinese ought, in time, to outstrip English by a wide margin (837+ million for Mandarin Chinese, 370+ million for English).
First-language users among other relatively affluent countries appear generally stable, the two largest being German and Japanese, which each have between 5% and 10% of the overall share.
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