this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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TIL: The English language dominates the web despite the world having more Chinese and Hindi speakers. (chat.maiion.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by maiion@chat.maiion.com to c/todayilearned@chat.maiion.com
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Rest of World turned to W3Techs, a web-scanning firm based in Austria, to count all of the publicly accessible web addresses on the internet to get hard numbers on the discrepancy. Our data shows that a little more than half the sites on the web use English as their primary language. That’s a lot more than one might expect, given that native English speakers only make up just under 5% of the global population. Meanwhile, Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most-spoken languages in the world, but the same scan found they account for just 1.4% and 0.07% of domains, respectively.

Source: What languages dominate the internet?

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[–] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've felt after learning this sort of thing, that no matter what bad may have happened, the world owes the British Empire a great debt of gratitude for spreading the language globally.

Without a global empire spreading a single language to every corner of the world, pretty much all the modern tools of communication would still be much more limited because we'd be a bunch of little enclaves of various languages instead of having a commonly understood one to communicate with.

[–] tegs_terry@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't say great debt of gratitude; it reduces the score.

[–] nxfsi@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago
  1. Most of the Chinese internet is on a handful of very large websites. Same thing probably applies to other languages.
  2. Every single non-ASCII domain name is a phishing site, no exceptions.