Which language dominates the Internet?

English is the primary language of over 50% of websites. Chinese, the second most common 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.

Approximately 63% of the world's population now has access to the internet. This is equivalent to a total of about 5 billion people, from all over the planet and speaking thousands of different languages.

However, some languages appear less frequently on the internet than others. According to W3Techs, an Austrian-based internet analytics company, over 50% of websites use English as their primary language. 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 they account for only 1.4% and 0.07% of all websites, respectively—a tiny fraction compared to English.

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

Ethnologue, a non-profit organization that tracks language use, also has similar survey data. English, German, and Japanese account for a large proportion of the internet, disproportionate to the number of native speakers of these languages. Conversely, 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, according to experts. Humanity may be heading towards a world where only a handful of languages are present online, Bhanu Neupane, a specialist on language inequality at UNESCO, told Rest of World.

"After 15 years, there may only be 5 or 10 languages spoken and used commonly online," Neupane warned.

UNESCO's surveys are also consistent with W3Techs' statistical results. Besides English, only 13 other languages account for more than 1% of the total number of domain names. Hundreds of other languages have an insignificant presence.

Millions of people who speak English as a second language, and those who do not speak English, may face difficulties using the internet.

Furthermore, because internet text is often used to train large language models such as BARD and GPT-4, the current inequality could lead to inequality in access to and use of the technology. Studies have already shown that AI models perform significantly more accurately when communicating in English.

According to Zing

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