Which language dominates the Internet?

English is the primary language of more than 50% of websites. Chinese, the second most popular language, is the primary language of just over 1%.

English is the language used on most websites, even though native English speakers make up only 5% of the world's population. Photo: Unsplash .

About 63% of the world's population now has access to the Internet. That's about 5 billion people, from all over the planet and speaking thousands of different languages.

Still, some languages are less visible on the Internet than others. More than 50% of websites use English as their primary language, according to W3Techs, an Austrian-based Internet analytics company. Meanwhile, native English speakers make up less than 5% of the global population.

Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most used languages on the Internet, but account for only 1.4% and 0.07% of all web pages respectively, a fraction of English.

Given the vastness of the Internet, W3Techs experts warn that the survey data is not entirely accurate and has certain blind spots. However, the dominance of English and the inequality of language use are evident. Languages such as Bengali and Urdu, spoken by hundreds of millions of people, are almost impossible to find online.

Ethnologue, a nonprofit that tracks language use, has similar survey data. English, German, and Japanese dominate the Internet, disproportionate to the number of native speakers they have. In contrast, many non-European languages are virtually nonexistent on the Internet.

This disparity is a worrying sign, and could even lead to the “extinction” of some languages, experts say. We may be moving towards a world where only a handful of languages are present online, Bhanu Neupane, a language inequality expert at UNESCO, told Rest of World.

“In 15 years, there may be only five or 10 languages that are spoken and used widely online,” Neupane warns.

UNESCO's survey is consistent with W3Techs' statistics. Besides English, only 13 other languages account for more than 1% of all domain names. The remaining hundreds of languages have a negligible presence.

Millions of people who speak English as a second language, and those who do not, may have difficulty using the Internet.

Additionally, since internet text is often used to train large language models like Bard and GPT-4, current inequality can lead to inequality in access to and use of technology. There have been studies showing that AI models are significantly more accurate when communicating in English.

According to Zing

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