[Summary]
The internet was born in 1974 in the U.S. before spreading to the
English-speaking community and then worldwide. This explain why it
took a little while for other languages than English to be
distributed. The first major study about language distribution on
the web was run by Babel, a joint project from the Internet
Society and Alis Technologies to contribute to the
internationalization of the internet. The results were published
in June 1997 in seven languages on a webpage named "Web Languages
Hit Parade". The main languages available on the web were English
with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%,
Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%. Three
years later, in spring 2000, non-English-speaking internet users
reached 50%, with a percentage steadily increasing then.
***
The first major study about language distribution on the web was
run in 1997 by Babel, a joint project from the Internet Society
and Alis Technologies to contribute to the internationalization of
the internet.
The internet was born in 1974 in the U.S. before spreading to the
English-speaking community and then worldwide. This explain why it
took a little while for other languages than English to be
distributed. People from all over the world began to have access
to the internet, despite a connection that was far from cheap in a
number of countries, and to post webpages in their own languages.
The percentage of webpages in English slowly decreased from nearly
100% in 1983 to 85% in 1997.
“Towards communicating on the internet in any language…” was the
subtitle of Babel, launched in 1997 as a plurilingual website in
seven languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese,
Spanish, Swedish), with information about the world's languages
and a typographical and linguistic glossary. A section named "The
Internet and Multilingualism" gave information on how to develop a
multilingual website, and how to code the "world's writing".
Babel ran the first major study relating to distribution of
languages on the web. The results were published in June 1997 in
seven languages on a webpage named “Web Languages Hit Parade”. The
main languages of the web were English with 82.3%, German with
4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%,
Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.
According to Randy Hobler, a consultant in internet marketing for
language translation software and services, interviewed in
September 1998: "85% of the content of the web in 1998 is in
English and going down. This trend is driven not only by more
websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by
increasing localization of company and organization sites, and
increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to
translate websites.”
Randy also explained in the same email interview: “Because the
internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is
bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of
multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of
what I call 'Language Nations'... all those people on the internet
wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native
language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only
Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users
in the U.S., as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco."
According to Global Reach, a marketing consultancy promoting
localization, there were 56 million non-English-speaking users in
July 1998, with 22.4% Spanish-speaking users, 12.3% Japanese-
speaking users, 14% German-speaking users and 10% French-speaking
users. 15% of Europe's half a billion population spoke English as
a first language, 28% didn't speak English at all, and 32% were
using the web in English.
In summer 1999, the number of internet users living outside the
U.S. reached 50%.
In summer 2000, the number of internet users having a mother
tongue other than English also reached 50%, and went on steadily
increasing then. According to statistics regularly published
online by Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in
December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003
(including 34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians),
and 64.2% in March 2004 (including 37.9% non-English-speaking
Europeans and 33% Asians).