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TIL: The English language dominates the web despite the world having more Chinese and Hindi speakers. (chat.maiion.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Rest of World turned to W3Techs, a web-scanning firm based in Austria, to count all of the publicly accessible web addresses on the internet to get hard numbers on the discrepancy. Our data shows that a little more than half the sites on the web use English as their primary language. That’s a lot more than one might expect, given that native English speakers only make up just under 5% of the global population. Meanwhile, Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most-spoken languages in the world, but the same scan found they account for just 1.4% and 0.07% of domains, respectively.

Source: What languages dominate the internet?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Is be interested in a comparison that includes more people than just "primary language" speakers, because most Chinese and English speakers don't use those languages as their primary language. Most Europeans, for example, can speak English even though their primary language is their native language.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Most of the Chinese internet is on a handful of very large websites. Same thing probably applies to other languages.
Every single non-ASCII domain name is a phishing site, no exceptions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've felt after learning this sort of thing, that no matter what bad may have happened, the world owes the British Empire a great debt of gratitude for spreading the language globally.

Without a global empire spreading a single language to every corner of the world, pretty much all the modern tools of communication would still be much more limited because we'd be a bunch of little enclaves of various languages instead of having a commonly understood one to communicate with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't say great debt of gratitude; it reduces the score.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I’m very surprised Russian is 2nd.