Non-English languages have some additional characteristics that were not
well-suited for the plain text ASCII of Project Gutenberg’s early days.
By the early 1990s, it was necessary to display accented characters, to
accommodate languages such as French and Spanish. Later, languages such
as Chinese would require entirely separate character sets.
OCR software may be poorly suited for several non-English languages, or
may fail due to older styles of typesetting (the old German “Fraktur” is
notorious in this regard).
Also, it is necessary to have proofreaders who are fluent in the
language, to assure the eBook is enjoyable and reasonably free of
errors. Despite these challenges, nearly 20% of the collection is in
a language other than English, with 65 separate languages or dialects
other than English. This emphasis on language diversity continues today,
and is limited only by the willingness of volunteers to submit copyright
clearances and prepare items for distribution.
Table 1: Language counts as of August 1, 2016, for 52615 eBooks.
# of eBooks Language code Language or dialect
43095 en English
2711 fr French
1469 de German
1421 fi Finnish
739 nl Dutch
678 it Italian
540 pt Portuguese
504 es Spanish
427 zh Chinese
219 el Greek
128 sv Swedish
112 hu Hungarian
112 eo Esperanto
102 la Latin
66 da Danish
60 tl Tagalog
31 pl Polish
31 ca Catalan
22 ja Japanese
17 no Norwegian
11 cy Welsh
10 cs Czech
9 ru Russian
7 is Icelandic
7 fur Friulian
6 te Telugu
6 he Hebrew
6 enm Middle English
6 bg Bulgarian
4 sr Serbian
4 ang Old English
4 af Afrikaans
3 nai North American Indian
3 nah Nahuatl
3 ilo Iloko
3 ceb Cebuano
2 ro Romanian
2 nav Navajo
2 myn Mayan Languages
2 mi Maori
2 grc Greek, Ancient
2 gla Gaelic, Scottish
2 ga Irish
2 fy Frisian
2 arp Arapaho
1 yi Yiddish
1 sl Slovenian
1 sa Sanskrit
1 rmr Calo
1 oji Ojibwa
1 oc Occitan
1 nap Napoletano- Calabrese
1 lt Lithuanian
1 ko Korean
1 kld Gamilaraay
1 kha Khasi
1 iu Inuktitut
1 ia Interlingua
1 gl Galician
1 fa Farsi
1 et Estonian
1 csb Kashubian
1 br Breton
1 bgi Giangan
1 ar Arabic
1 ale Aleut