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By Andres Heuberger

As an English speaker it can be easy to forget that WWW refers to the WORLD Wide Web. Developed in the U.S., English has long been the dominant language on the Internet. But this is quickly changing.

Global Reach, an international marketing/communication consultancy, has just released the latest estimated figures of the number of each online language population (native speakers).

Global Reach (http://www.glreach.com) classifies by language instead of by country, since people speaking the same language form their own online community no matter what country they happen to live in.

The following represents the number of people in each language zone connected to the Internet, and what this online population represents worldwide:

• While 57.4% of total world online population speaks English (129 million people), non-English speakers have grown to represent 42.6% of Internet users (95.6 million people)
• Amongst European languages (59.3 million users or 26.4% of worldwide online population), the following are the top four languages:
  1. German with 14.0 million users
  2. Spanish with 9.6 million users
  3. French with 9.3 million users
  4. Dutch with 4.4 million users
• Asian Languages account for 16.2% of all users or 36.4 million people. The composition of the Big Three isn't as surprising as the numbers—as many Chinese as French people use the Web and online use of Japanese dwarfs that of any continental European language!
  1. Japanese with 19.7 million users
  2. Chinese with 9.9 million users
  3. Korean with 4.3 million users

Interesting stuff. The complete study can be viewed at http://glreach.com/globstats/.

Andres Heuberger is an editor at multilingualwebmaster.com. He frequently writes on issues related to technology, translation, and regulations. Rants and raves can be sent to aheuberger@multilingualwebmaster.com.

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