Index

2008-05-11

Internationalization of web pages

English is the most common language in international trade, but there are many people in the world who do not understand English. Over 313 billion web pages have been published on the World Wide Web, and approximately 70% of them are written in English. Here are some global internet statistics of web content by language:

Language	Percent of web content
English	68.4%
Japanese	5.9%
German	5.8%
Chinese	3.9%
French	3.0%
Spanish	2.4%
Russian	1.9%

It is important to consider that the native language of people using the internet is not always English. About 30% of the web surfers are English speakers, but 15% speak Chinese, and 9% speak Spanish. Here are some statistics of the percent of users who surf the internet.

Language	Percent users	Number of users
English	30.1%	379M
Chinese	14.7%	185M
Spanish	9.0%	113M
Japanese	6.9%	88M
French	5.1%	64M
German	4.9%	62M
Portuguese	4.0%	51M

From these statistics, it is evident that Chinese and Spanish readers are being underserved. Web sites seeking to expand their global audience should consider translating some of their pages to make them accessible to speakers of other languages.

ScientificPsychic.com uses the following national flags to indicate the availability of web pages in other languages:

	English
	Spanish
	French
	German
	Russian

To see an example of an internationalized web page see:

English Verb Conjugation and Inflectional Morphology

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