The language of the Web 217
Table 7.1 Language distribution on the Web (see fn. 34)Number Corrected
Ranking Language of pages percentage
1 English 2,722 82.3
2 German 147 4.0
3 Japanese 101 1.6
4 French 59 1.5
5 Spanish 38 1.1
6 Swedish 35 0.6
7 Italian 31 0.8
8 Portuguese 21 0.7
9 Dutch 20 0.4
10 Norwegian 19 0.3
11 Finnish 14 0.3
12 Czech 11 0.3
13 Danish 9 0.3
14 Russian 8 0.1
15 Malay 4 0.1
none or unknown 5.6
(correction)
Total 3,239 100headline of one piece inTheNewYorkTimes,^35 and the article went
on to comment: ‘if you want to take full advantage of the Internet
there is only one real way to do it: learn English’. The writer did
acknowledge the arrival of other languages:
As the Web grows the number of people on it who speak French,
say, or Russian will become more varied and that variety will be
expressed on the Web. That is why it is a fundamentally
democratic technology.However, he concluded:
But it won’t necessarily happen soon.
The evidence is growing that this conclusion was wrong. The
estimates for languages other than English have steadily risen since
(^35) Specter (1996).