The percentage of English-speaking internet users decreased from nearly
100% in 1983 to 82.3% in June 1997. People from all over the world
began to have access to the internet, and to post more and more
webpages in their own languages. The first major study about language
distribution on the web was run by Babel, a joint initiative from Alis
Technologies, a company specializing in language translation services,
and the Internet Society. The results were published in June 1997 on a
webpage named "Web Languages Hit Parade". The main languages 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%.