Website Globalization - Top Ten Languages Used on Web
Posted by Jim Cottrell on Mon, Jul 28, 2008 @ 04:11 PM
If you are reading this post, then you can obviously read English. But did you know that makes you a minority? Yes, that's true! According to the world language stats found on the Internet World Stats website, only 30.4% of all Internet users use English. That means if your website is only in English, 70% of the world can't read it. They can't buy your products. They can't use your service. They just click over to another site which in their own language.
Here are some other facts and figures... One estimate I saw was that there are over 156 million websites in the world. And, there are 1.4 billion internet users. But yet, only 427 million internet users read English. In a world of 6.7 billion people, that's not many! Can you imagine the growth potential that still exists?!
Here are the top 10 languages used on the internet:
- English - 427 million users
- Chinese - 233 million users
- Spanish - 122 million users
- Japanese - 94 million users
- French - 67 million users
- German - 64 million users
- Arabic - 60 million users
- Portuguese - 58 million users
- Korean - 35 million users
- Italian - 34 million users
Of course, there is more to selling your products around the world than just taking your website and doing a website translation into all of these languages. Before jumping into a website localization project, it's important to realize that if you want a Spanish website for example; you really should have someone on staff who can respond to customer calls or E-mails that you might receive in Spanish. If someone in your office has strong bilingual skills and is customer-oriented, this might be a great opportunity. Then, you can start thinking about translating your website into Spanish, Chinese, French, or whatever language you want to go after.
Here's another fun fact. If you look at the Top 10 languages above, which one do you think has grown the fastest since 2000? It's Arabic. The number of Arabic internet users has increased 2062%. By comparison, the number of English internet users has increased only 201% during the same period of time. This same study estimates 17% of Arabic-speaking people have access to the internet. That's not far behind English-speaking people where 21% have access to the internet. Both are a far cry from the 74% of Japanese-speaking people who are connected.
There are a couple of languages that aren't on the list which surprised me - Russia and Hindi. Both languages are in the Top 10 as far as overall usage but they must have limited access to the internet as their countries continue to develop and modernize.
If you are interested in our website translation services for your own website, please contact me. I can work with you to see if it makes sense to have your website translated into another language for prospective clients here in the United States or around the world.