Languages on the Internet

The most-used language on the Internet is English language. Although the total number of native English speakers in the world is about 322 million, English is spoken as a second language by almost 200 million people around the world. They make their contributions to the Internet in their own language as well as in English.

Chinese language is the most spoken language on Earth, and the second language on the Internet. The Chinese population online is increasing at a high rate; this is expected to have a great impact on the Internet in the near future.

Notably absent from the table below is Hindi language, one of the most commonly spoken languages of the world, as well as the national language of India, the second most populated country in the world. This is due to factors such as the lack of access to the Internet by the large majority of the Indian population, and a preference for English among those users who have Internet access.

The figures in the table below were taken from Global Reach [http://global-reach.biz/globstats]. These are an estimate at September 2004 of the world online population per language.