As infrastructure in developing countries increases, more and more people have access to the internet. The total number of internet users grows daily, and the majority of these are in non-English speaking countries.
Contact usThe number of English pages online is increasing daily, but it is nothing compared with the number of new Chinese, Russian and Spanish pages. New websites are constantly going live to meet the demands of growing numbers of internet users in emerging marketplaces, where improvements in infrastructure have led to increased internet access for the general population. In this article, we show the top ten internet languages used back in 2011 and how they compare to those of 2020.
Rank |
Language |
Internet users |
% of all internet users |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | English | 565,004,000 | 27% |
| 2 | Chinese | 509,965,000 | 25% |
| 3 | Spanish | 164,969,000 | 8% |
| 4 | Japanese | 99,182,000 | 5% |
| 5 | Portuguese | 82,587,000 | 4% |
| 6 | German | 75,423,000 | 4% |
| 7 | Arabic | 65,365,000 | 3% |
| 8 | French | 59,779,000 | 3% |
| 9 | Russian | 59,700,000 | 3% |
| 10 | Korean | 39,440,000 | 2% |
1 “Number of Internet Users by Language”, Internet World Stats, Miniwatts Marketing Group, 31 May 2011
Rank |
Language |
Internet users |
% of all internet users |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | English | 1,186,451,052 | 25.9% |
| 2 | Chinese | 888,453,068 | 19.4% |
| 3 | Spanish | 363,684,593 | 7.9% |
| 4 | Arabic | 237,418,349 | 5.2% |
| 5 | Indonesian | 198,029,815 | 4.3% |
| 6 | Portuguese | 171,750,818 | 3.7% |
| 7 | French | 151,733,611 | 3.3% |
| 8 | Japanese | 118,353,942 | 2.6% |
| 9 | Russian | 59,700,000 | 2.5% |
| 10 | German | 92,525,427 | 2% |
2 “Number of Internet Users by Language”, Internet World Stats, Miniwatts Marketing Group, 31 March 2020
With the percentage of English speaking internet users decreasing and the division between the remaining nine languages becoming more evenly spread, the appeal of translating your website has arguably grown. Chinese and English no longer dominate the market and languages such as Japanese and Spanish are increasing in online popularity. Now is the perfect time therefore to get translating your content. After all, if these trends continue, it won’t be long before these figures balance out even further.
Contact us for more information about localising into the Top 10 languages.