The most spoken languages: on the internet and in real life
Discussion
It used to be the second language by numbers of books published I believe
The Frankfurt Book Fair is still of worldwide renown and still the largest of its kind. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Book_Fair
A friend of mine recently had his first book pitched there โ subsequent to its having been published in the U.S. โ and snagged deals there with a German, an Italian, and a Polish publishing house.
A French edition had already been negotiated separately.
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What??? Thatโs soo cool!!! I wanna go!!! I have a dumb book I published but I would love to!!
I expected it to be second place
Yet itโs not even on the list of most spoken languages. Maybe itโs too hard to learn?
Grammatically, itโs actually quite similar to Old English, with three grammatical genders and with noun declensions. Its syntax is, at least through its literature, the most baroque among the European languages that Iโm aware of (I exclude Basque and Hungarian from that reckoning ). Yesterday, in fact, I literally translated a sentence from the 18th century German author Heinrich von Kleist into English because I marveled at its fugue-like syntax. German-speakers, including for the reasons I gave above, have been found to have particularly active left hemispheres of the brain. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-wires-native-language-neurons#:~:text=Brain%20differences,lines)%20bridging%20the%20two%20hemispheres.
The Kleist sentence:
โCount William von Breysach who, since his secret elopement with a Countess, Catherine von Heersbruck by name, from the House of Alt-Hรผningen, who beneath his rank to be appeared, with his half-brother, Count Jacob the Redbeard, in enmity lived, came towards the end of the 14th century, as the Eve of Saint Remigius began to fall, from an in-Worms-with-the-Kaiser-held meeting back, wherein he with his lordship, in the absence of lawful children, who were dead to him, the legitimation of a with-his-companion-before marriage-borne natural son, Count Philip von Hรผnigen, concluded had.โ
Kleist was a master of this, and it does read more masterfully under his pen; but itโs syntax such as this that led Mark Twain to publish โThe Awful German Language.โ
German has just below 100 milions of L1 speakers, and maybe up to 85 milions of L2s. Considering how "tight" the positions on the chart could get after Arabic, no wonder why German isn't.
According to this list, Standard German is at 12. place. (excluding Swiss German, Bavarian-Austrian dialect and so on).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
Countries don't have the same access and level of usage of the Internet.
I'd be very careful with these stats. A lot of websites do not specify the language they are written in in the metadata, and usually, default assumption is English (or perhaps you just use WordPress with an interface in English to host a website not in English). So many websites not actually in English could be counted as English language websites if the study only looked at metadata...
Anyone ever heard of Others? Seems like a pretty good language to pickup.
I've been learning Others recently. It's not an easy languageย
Really? Love to challenge myself.
Yeah, you need to learn like six different alphabets to even start
No, I haven't heard of it. Other-wise I would've definitely learnt it
Sounds like an ice lake cracking in the morning sun, basically impossible to learn.
Other language has other accents. But I hate to hear broken other language. You should speak like a native.
Other is my native language and is really under appreciated, it's really pretty and fairly common around the world.
I wouldn't see these graphs as a reliable source. Idk about the others but the stats for arabic is wrong (there's more than 274m)
This is a bullshit study.
How are Mandarin and Hindi not included in the most used languages online?
The title is terribly misleading, it isn't "most spoken languages on the internet." It is number of websites. So a handful of sites like Youtube, Facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit, etc. make up a majority of the total internet in terms of content, but wordpress sites account for some 43% of websites, and about 24% more are on some other form of content management system.
So this chart shows:
- The total number of speakers of each language (not necessarily the most spoken, a lot of those English speakers primarily use another language)
- The number of websites using each language (which is about the equivalent of showing where having a personal blog or a website for your small business is the most popular, and may be furthermore skewed by some website builders defaulting to having their metadata claim the site is in English, even if it is actually in another language or multi-lingual)
tl;dr: It's a pie chart of what languages are associated with cultures where people start blogs.
Thatโs what Iโm saying. Personally I have seen WAY more Chinese than German.
most mainstream websites are not available in china, and the internet is heavily censored and practically no one in india uses hindi on the internet. they know english sufficiently well enough to navigate their way around the internet.
Just because most Chinese are behind the great firewall, doesn't mean they aren't a part of the internet. I know mainland Chinese and the amount of native websites they can access is vast.
they are hard to measure and access for outsiders tho. so yeah the study is kind of misleading because of the lack of chinese internet, but other than that i dont see any other big issue with it.
You don't see an issue that the article we are discussing is totally wrong and uses poor methodology?
It completely excluded the most natively spoken language on the planet. That is a massive oversight.
true, they should have clearly mentioned it somewhere in the picture.
Apart that they are also on western websites, and A LOT.
This is untrue, Hindi and other Indian languages are used on the internet either in the Latin script or in their original scripts. 62% of the Indian population is on the internet while only ~10% of the population knows English
im indian, and almost everyone ik excluding those above the age of 60 uses english as their device language. they may not know how to conversate in english, but they know what words home, cancel, back, post and subscribe mean.
It's selection bias, most people you know will belong to a similar socio-economic status. I'm also Indian and I have met countless people who have their device language in Hindi; even my device language is Hindi. Check out some popular regional songs and you'll see all the comments are in Devanagari. Even on more "urban" content people comment in Hindi using the Latin script.
This is something I was taught when I worked as a designer โ don't put two different charts next to each other to compare data. It's really confusing.
So frustrating.
Maybe they were on a diet and could only have one donut and one bar.
Because they are not fluent in chart, so they had to change the interpretation on the 2nd one.
No website uses Chinese, that's good to know
many actually do, mostly being chinese sites though.. but in the grand scheme of things, it's practically locked to just china
Yeah I know haha, I assume it was hard to account for statistics, just found it funny Chinese wasn't in the image
Same here. I can't believe Chinese is not listed, it's got to be larger than Russian (if we count ALL the sites) or comparable to it (if we count only the sites available to the Western audiences)
I am learning Japanese, but if I googled just the kanji/hanzi, I'd often get hits from Chinese websites and had to be extra vigilant to find the Japanese sources
If you wanna make sure you're gonna get only the Japanese sources of a kanji or word, write ใจใฏ after the kanji/word you're searching. For example, if you wanna know what ๆพ่ชฒๅพ means, search ๆพ่ชฒๅพใจใฏ.
Itโs a regulation thing. All Chinese sites must register and be approved by police to be accessed, making it a hassle to for individuals to set up a new site. So itโs more common to rely on major portals, and thus reduces the total number of sites
โjust chinaโ would be enough to make the ranks. itโs a clear oversight.
A good point!
Apart from other reasons, the owners of Chinese sites guard access to their data like Smaug over its gold hoard. They usually ban crawlers, and herd users to migrate to their phone apps aggressively.
Therefore, search engines like Google or Baidu are almost useless. Those who know better search through the internal search bar of popular apps (Wechat/Weibo/Xiaohongshu/etc) one by one. Zhihu and Douban are sort of exceptions for their transparency. In the case of Wechat, many of the third party gadgets๏ผๅฐ็จๅบ) make their contents invisible to the main WeChat search function, and you have to go through these one by one ๐ง
When I was living among Uyghurs and Tajiks in Xinjiang in 2021, most of them exclusively use verbal communication on TikTok-like platforms like Douyin or Kuaishou, to replace texting, posting, sharing or even online commerce apps. โModeratorsโ donโt like them using their written language.
Finally, for unknown reasons, some sites ban foreign IP addresses, and you get this graph๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
Whenever I see these kinds of stats, I always start calculating in my head how many people I could speak to if I learned X or Y language. Then I remember that I have no friends and I only speak to like 6 people in my own native languages, half of which work at the local grocery store. ^^
Honestly Chinese internet is censored very heavily. And users restricted and websites limited to government approved ones . There probably would be more Chinese ones if not for this .ย
Internet censorship and surveillance has been tightly implemented in China that block social websites like Gmail, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. The excessive censorship practices of the Great Firewall of China have now engulfed the VPN service providers as well.
yeah, we do have a heavy censorship in our website and I agree some points you've mentioned, but I feel like this statistician simply doesn't know about Chinese websites LoL
I feel like it's Google statistics and Google isn't in chinaย
There are taiwanese people who uses the Chinese language too
I have never lived in a country without a sizeable Chinese community that speaks at least one variation of the Chinese language.
Apart from other reasons, the owners of Chinese sites guard access to their data like Smaug over its gold hoard. They usually ban crawlers, and herd users to migrate to their phone apps aggressively.
Therefore, search engines like Google or Baidu are almost useless. Those who know better search through the internal search bar of popular apps (Wechat/Weibo/Xiaohongshu/etc) one by one. Zhihu and Douban are sort of exceptions for their transparency. In the case of Wechat, many of the third party gadgets๏ผๅฐ็จๅบ) make their contents invisible to the main WeChat search function, and you have to go through these one by one ๐ง
When I was living among Uyghurs and Tajiks in Xinjiang in 2021, most of them exclusively use verbal communication on TikTok-like platforms like Douyin or Kuaishou, to replace texting, posting, sharing or even online commerce apps. โModeratorsโ donโt like them using their written language.
Finally, for unknown reasons, some sites ban foreign IP addresses, and you get this graph๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
As someone having issues with phone use China's draconian social media laws look appealing sadly
what is the point of this figure, if you don't include chinese websites?
What a terrible infographic. First, they used two separate graphs for the same variable. Secondly, one graph uses number in millions and the other uses percentages.
ไธบไปไนๆฒกๆไบบๅจ็บฟ่ฏดไธญๆ๏ผ
The Chinese internet/intranet is censored to hell, but it still should take up a significant portion
Well. These stats are not accurate. W3Tech, the company that created this data, uses only front pages of each website and doesn't go in-depth.
"The figures from the W3Techs study are based on the one million most visited websites (i.e., approximately 0.27 percent of all websites according to December 2011 figures) as ranked by Alexa.com, and language is identified using only the home page of the sites in most cases (e.g., all of Wikipedia is based on the language detection of http://www.wikipedia.org). As a consequence, the figures show a significantly higher percentage for many languages (especially for English) as compared to the figures for all websites. For all websites, estimates are between 20 and 50% for English."
This is the W3Tech Wikipedia entry. I would take these graphs with a grain of salt.
And also, use the same graphs for the comparison! Bar chart + pie chart don't give you the image of the differences.
I'm sorry, but this is not true. W3Techs covers much more than one million sites, and they visit also inner pages, see https://w3techs.com/technologies and https://w3techs.com/faq. This can also be seen when checking their Wikipedia info: https://w3techs.com/sites/info/wikipedia.org
So italian is more spoken than arabic on the internet???
I feel like these results are skewed and donโt take every single website into account. If this were true Chinese would be on this list, and pretty high up there. However, I do see English dominate a vast majority of social media. Itโs normalized for non-native speakers to speak English online but the other way around is frowned upon on some social media, namely Twitter or TikTok, because youโre perceived as โpretendingโ to be from where thatโs language is spoken. Iโve been accused of pretending to be Asian before because Iโve tweeted in Japanese and Chinese. Itโs odd and a chronically online user behavior, but I think instances like this are also why English has such a high percentage online. Iโm seeing this change a bit in some areas of the internet but itโs very possible that weโll start to see other languages than Englishโs percentages rise if we normalize multilingual usage online more, as we do on the โspoken in real lifeโ section.
I am pretty sure the "Internet" does not include Chinese social medias and websites like Wei Bo, Chinese Tik Tok and many more, because there are tons of apps and webs that only Chinese users use.
It's not specified what 'Internet' means here and how it's measured. I can't imagine there is more Italian on the internet than Chinese.
Sure if you look at Western websites that many Chinese can't access. But the Chinese internet, is still the internet. I'm sure if it would be calculated properly (though that might not be possible if the correct data can't be gathered), that it would be a big chunk of the internet.
How do you even measure "the internet"?
Seems impossible to measure. The complete lack of Chinese on there tells me it's not accurate
You take a sample from the population and generalize the results. The bigger the sample the better, but the webpages must be selected randomly for the results to be correct.
And depending on how did the collected the language, most webpages have English as the default, even if they are in other language.
italy and japan nursing that soft power
I think they only count text content. and in languages like Hindi they do this thing were their videos have an English title and even the comments are mostly in English. but the video itself is in hindi so that is why it's mostly European languages on this list
It warms my heart seeing Portuguese hanging in there with a "big language" like Italian. I say "big language" because stuff like videogames and tech videos usually get translated into French,German and Italian while completely ignoring us Portuguese speakers.
I feel like Hindi is an understatement. When I travelled around India in places like west bengal and Panjab most communication was still in Hindi and most people in those regions seem to have a working knowledge of Hindi.
Talk about a dumb graph. Should be a mixed bar chart so you can compare
I speak ukrainian, I know ukrainian, russian, english and something german, I something understand polish, czechian, belarussian, slovakian, bulgarian, serbian, slovenian and other slavic languages
Woah okay interesting!
Hmm...that "most spoken language in real life" surely is just native speakers, no? xD
No, it must be including L2 speakers because if it was only L1 then English would be surpassed by Spanish and Mandarin
Portuguese's numbers seem way too low for me....Brazil alone has about 80% of that value in population.
Saving this to use on the people that say โyou know more than English speakers use the internetโ yes thatโs true but if I guess English I have a higher chance of being right
Definitive proof that English is the world's best language!
You lost your way to r/the_donald.
Number cannot lie. I am a positivist.
Yes, english is popular, but the most part of people who use it, don't have a high level and of it or have an accent that make it not easy to understand them.
I speak 3 of the above mentioned languages :)) english french and arabic, didn't know french was this popular tho
I'm surprised Chinese and Hindi didn't make the list
I wonder if Hindi and Bengali disappear on the internet graph compared to the real life graph because so many Indian websites use English to be accessible to all regions of India
Then itโs better described as a closed intranet
Fairly impressed about Hindi and Chinese not being in the most used online. Considering that many times that I search info related to niche topics the only guys that have the information speak one of those.
If I speak English and Chinese fluently, what is next language I should learn if I want to widen my worldview as much as possible? Thx
I think Russian. Its spoken by 250 million+ people, was very historically significant and is still the lingua franca in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. It's also been really interesting to explore Russian content too, its unlike the other cultures I'm familiar with. (I also speak English, Chinese as well as Japanese)
๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
Spanish. (I speak English and Spanish fluently, and I'm working on Chinese.) Not only are there a massive number of Spanish speakers, the language has a geographic spread that is second only to English.
I'm more curious about the amount of commerce that is transacted in a given language.
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Chinese isn't in the top languages used on the internet? That is suspicious. Chinese use the internet as much if not more than anyone. How could German possibly be spoken more? Most Chinese people use Chinese only websites and every German I've met also uses English online.
The number of speakers doesn't at all indicate how often it is spoken in real life.
Since most English speakers are indeed non-native speakers, they probably speak it more on the internet than in real life. Indeed, I as a non-native speaker of English living in a country where it is not a common language rarely speak English in real life opposed to on the internet and I would argue that that is a very common situation.
I didn't expect German as 5,0% of the internet.