The most common languages on the Internet
A recent study tasked with determining which languages are most prevalent on the Internet. It was conducted on a sample of 10 million most visited sites online, and the results are partly expected and partly surprising.
Anglodomination
The complete list looks like this:
| Ordinal number | Language | Number of sites among the top 10M |
| 1 | English | 60.4% |
| 2 | Russian | 8.5% |
| 3 | Spanish | 4% |
| 4 | Turkish | 3.7% |
| 5 | Arabic | 3% |
| 6 | French | 2.6% |
| 7 | German | 2.4% |
| 8 | Japanese | 2.1% |
| 9 | Vietnamese | 1.7% |
| 10 | Simplified Chinese | 1.4% |
However, if we look at the list of the population that uses these languages, whether it is their mother tongue or another, the list looks a little different:
| Ordinal number | Language | Population |
| 1 | English | 16.2% |
| 2 | Chinese | 14.3% |
| 3 | Spanish | 6.9% |
| 4 | French | 3.5% |
| 5 | Russian | 3.3% |
| 6 | German | 1.7% |
| 7 | Japanese | 1.6% |
| 8 | Turkish | 1.1% |
| 9 | Vietnamese | 1% |
| 10 | Arabic | 0.7% |
English is expected to be the most common language online, present in almost two-thirds of the 10 million most visited sites. This is not strange, because this language is spoken by most people in the world, over 1.13 billion. The Chinese language is the second in the number of people who use it, but it is ranked very low among the top 10M sites. However, this does not mean that there is a small percentage of sites in Chinese, but only that they generate significantly fewer visits globally than sites in English, so they are not among the 10 million most visited sites considered in this study. The Russian language is perhaps surprisingly highly ranked, but it should be borne in mind that it is spoken not only in Russia but also in many countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.
From this research, we can conclude that English and Russian are likely to continue to dominate the web, but that Asian languages have the greatest potential for growth. Also, it has been shown that the use of language on sites does not necessarily reflect how many people speak it. The biggest example of that is Hindi, the third language in the number of people who speak it, which is not on this list at all.