Stardate 20011112.1254 (On Screen): According to this report, English no longer dominates the web -- well, sort of.
For the first time in the history of the World Wide Web, native English speakers are no longer the dominant demographic group on the Internet, thanks to a surge of more than 100 million new Internet users in 2001, a report released today found.
The third annual "State of the Internet Report," produced jointly by the U.S. Internet Council and International Technology & Trade Associates Inc., (ITTA) found the new users – mainly from the South Pacific region – helped shrink the share of native English speakers online to roughly 45 percent of the estimated total of 500 million Web users.
That said, I suspect it's still the case that there are more native English speakers actively using the web than there are native speakers of any other single language. English may no longer have an active majority of native speakers but I suspect it's still the single largest one. But that's not the real issue. There are many, many web users for whom English is a second language who still use English-language web sites heavily. (I can tell from my usage logs that I get a lot of hits from non-English-speaking nations. The real question would be this: of all the languages spoken by all the people who use the web, which language is spoken by more of them? There can be no doubt that it is English, nor that a substantial majority (probably in excess of three quarters) of web users are English speakers either as a first or second language.
This is so obvious a point that I have to wonder what the agenda was of those who originated this study. Just why was it that they felt it was important to make this observation? (discuss)
