English and Chinese Languages Dominate Languages Used On the Internet But Spanish Language Grew At Nearly Twice the Rate of English Growth

In the Internet world, the top two languages are English and Chinese with each of these two languages accounting for 31.7 percent of all Internet users, according to Internet World Stats. There are over 365.8 million English speaking users and over 166 million Chinese users. Spanish is the third most used language on the Internet with over 101 million users.

“These recently updated statistics available on Internetworldstats.com point to some interesting opportunities for retailers of products and services on the web,” said Jinny Bromberg, president of Bromberg and Associates, LLC. “As a translation services firm, we see the future demand going up for providing web content translations particularly in Spanish, but Chinese as well.”

Spanish as an Internet language rose 311.4% in the past 7 years, according to Internet World Stats (internetworldstats.com). Yet, with over 101 million Spanish speaking people using the Internet, this still represents only 22.9 percent of the total 442,525,601 world population that speaks Spanish. Currently, Spanish is the language of 8.8 percent of all Internet users.

Growth of the Chinese language on the Internet tops that of English or Spanish and, at 413.9 percent growth over the past 7 years, the growth of Chinese on the Internet rivals the combined 469 percent growth of both Spanish and English. However, Arabic and Portuguese represented the two largest segments of growth in this same time period, although they represent smaller percentages of total Internet users.

“If a business is involved in e-commerce, it just makes good business sense,” Bromberg added, “particularly when one considers that translation cost is low when compared to potential sales revenue. The use of Chinese and Spanish have risen dramatically.”