The Briefing
- English is the most common language online, used by 60.4% of the top 10M websites
- China has the most internet users in the world but only 1.4% of the top 10M websites use Chinese
The Most Used Languages on the Internet
Online content on the world wide web is consumed in thousands of different languages.
Some are more common than others, but it’s interesting to see that the online use of a language doesn’t always reflect how many people speak it. For example, Hindi is the third most spoken language worldwide, but it isn’t one of the top languages used on the internet.
Here’s a look at the top 20 most used languages on the internet, compared to their real-world use among the global population.
| Rank | Language | % of Top 10M Websites | Share of Speaking Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | English | 60.4% | 16.2% |
| 2 | Russian | 8.5% | 3.3% |
| 3 | Spanish | 4.0% | 6.9% |
| 4 | Turkish | 3.7% | 1.1% |
| 5 | Persian | 3.0% | 0.7% |
| 6 | French | 2.6% | 3.5% |
| 7 | German | 2.4% | 1.7% |
| 8 | Japanese | 2.1% | 1.6% |
| 9 | Vietnamese | 1.7% | 1.0% |
| 10 | Simplified Chinese | 1.4% | 14.3% |
| 11 | Portuguese | 1.3% | 3.2% |
| 12 | Standard Arabic | 1.1% | 3.5% |
| 13 | Italian | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| 14 | Indonesian | 0.7% | 2.5% |
| 15 | Greek | 0.7% | 0.2% |
| 16 | Polish | 0.6% | 0.6% |
| 17 | Dutch | 0.6% | 0.3% |
| 18 | Korean | 0.6% | 1.0% |
| 19 | Thai | 0.5% | 0.8% |
| 20 | Ukrainian | 0.4% | 0.5% |
“Share of speaking population” refers to the percentage of the global population that identifies as a speaker of a particular language, either as their native tongue or a second language. Data as of January 2021.
English is by far the most commonly used language online, used by 60.4%, or about six million of the top 10 million websites. Not surprisingly, it’s also the most spoken language worldwide, with over 1.13 billion speakers.
By contrast, Chinese is spoken by 14.3% of the global population–more than 1.11 billion people—but it’s only used by 1.4% of the top 10 million websites.
Interestingly, Russian takes the second spot in the ranking in part due to the significant online presence of Runet, the internet’s Russian language community. Furthermore, it’s also the official language of multiple countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.
The Future of Languages on the Web
Although it’s likely that English and Russian will continue to dominate the web, Asian languages have the highest potential for growth in internet usage.
With an untapped audience of more than 1 billion people, the share of languages like Chinese and Arabic may grow alongside the region’s online population.
Where does this data come from?
Source: W3Techs, Ethnologue, and the United Nations via Hootsuite
Details: Based on the top 10 million websites by traffic rankings from Alexa.com.
