Most used languages online: English dominates, and it’s a problem for everyone
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More than 55% of sites in the world are in English, or use English as the primary language: the figure emerges from an interesting analysis published by Rest of World at the beginning of June.
Interesting twice: because it gives the measure of how big the gap between English and other languages used on the Net and why it highlights the discrepancy between what happens online and what happens in the real world.
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The differences between the online and the real world
Yes, because the point is not only that English is widely used on the Internet but above all that this does not correspond to what happens away from the Web: English is used by 55.6% of sites but spoken by only 4.7% of the world’s population. He’s overrepresented by more than 10 times, in short.
Happens also to other languagesalbeit not so much: French, Japanese and German, spoken by a tiny fraction of the world, are still widely used online.
At the other extreme are the widely spoken languages for real and instead very little used on the Internet: it is the case of Portuguese (used as their primary language by 2.9% of people and present on 2.3% of sites), dello Spanish (5.9% against 4.9%) and enormously with the mandarinthe most important of the Chinese languages, spoken by 16.4% of the world population but present online in only 1.4% of sites.
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Why dominance of English is a problem
As we have often written about Italian Techthis is not only a cultural but also a technological problem, because there is the strong, very strong risk that this predominance of English is reflected (for example) also in the development of artificial intelligenceswho are currently trained primarily in English and on data from the United States.
More generally, the Unesco officials themselves said they were “concerned” by the fact that, in the span of 15 years, there will be “only 5 or 10 meaningfully spoken languages in business and online”. This despite the fact that the situation is already much better than in the past: the World Wide Web was created by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in the late eighties and entered the public domain in the early nineties. And then, predictably, English dominated, accounting for about 80% of the content online. Some progress has been made since then and it is hoped that the UN initiative to bring the Internet to everyone by 2030 will allow others to move in the direction of greater plurality.
@capoema
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