Who’s using the Net?
When I first went on-line in 1995, the Internet was dominated by English speakers but, over the years, this has changed dramatically. Although all the material on my web site and blogs are in English, I’ve always endeavoured to address subjects covering a wide range of countries and cultures. Indeed the latest additions to the circulation list for my “Thought For The Week” e-mail are three Russians and three Ukranians.
Today there are over a billion Net users worldwide. The break-down by language is as follows:
- English – 29.9%
- Chinese – 14.0%
- Spanish – 8.0%
- Japanese – 7.9%
- German – 5.4%
- French – 5.0%
- Portguese – 3.1%
- Korean – 3.1%
- Italian – 2.8%
- Arabic – 2.6%
- Others – 18.2%
You can find out more here.
The growth of Chinese users is especially rapid and, according to this article, Chinese users (currently 137M) could overtake US users (now 210M) in the next two years.