Usage Statistics

An assortment of languages are spoken around the world. Language usage statistics indicate the popularity of languages on a worldwide basis which is consistent with world population trends. According to Wikipedia.org, the top five world language statistics are as follows: Chinese Mandarin (873 million), Hindi (370 million), Spanish (370 million), English (340 million) and Arabic (206 million).

There have also been studies done to estimate internet language statistics. These statistics do not necessary equate with spoken language statistics. The western world enjoys superior internet access and higher disposable income making the internet more readily accessible to browsers. According to online language usage statistics by InternetWorldStats.com, the number of internet users can be classified according to language preferences. More than 35% of internet users use the English language followed by the Chinese language (13%) and the Japanese language (8.2%).

Foreign language statistics can be further classified according to preferences in the native state. In China, 85% of citizens prefer to browse the internet in their native language. Similarly, this figure is 84% in Japan, 82% in Brazil and Spain, 81% in Argentina and Peru and 79% in Germany.

The following world language statistics have been collected from internetworldstats.com and Nielsen Netratings. In USA, there are more than 202.45 million Americans who browse the internet in English. In the UK, there are about 34.9 million people using the English language when browsing the web. Similarly, this figure is 20.45 million in Canada, 13.5 million in Australia, 1.3 million in Ireland and 3.5 million in South Africa (figures for 2004).

The Chinese language is the second largest language used on the internet. The number of people using this language in China is around 87 million. Hong Kong has 4.9 million people using the Chinese language to browse the net, Taiwan has 8.8 million and Singapore has 2.14 million.

The third most popular language is Japanese. In Japan itself, there are 66.5 million citizens who browse the internet in their native language. In addition, there also exists around 200,000 Americans who access the internet in Japanese.

Internet use is set to continue to rise in the years to come. With internet infrastructure set to improve in less well developed countries, more non speaking internet browsers can be expected to enter the online space. Countries such as Africa and Russia which have low access levels can be expected to contribute to this. Long term, the composition of online language statistics could look radically different.

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