- From: Shelby Moore <shelby@coolpage.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 21:14:12 -0600
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
At 10:20 PM 12/17/2002 +0000, David Woolley wrote: > >> > It is the most popular on the web by far. In fact, I saw a statistic >> > recently on CNN how English is advancing at a ravishing pace. It is > >I can't find the original of this message, in reaction to the quote, I >would point out that I've heard that Chinese is about to overtake English >as the most common web page language. You must be referring to web users, not web pages. Apparently not even close: http://global-reach.biz/globstats/refs.php3 See bottom of page. Apparently 68% of web pages are in English and next most used language for web pages is Japanese at 6%. As I said, English is by far (at least an order of magnitute) higher priority than any other single language. And if you weight pages according to economic and technical (serious) significance, then I bet you will find English is at least 2 orders of magnitude higher priority: http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/magazine/99/0730/cover1.html The 64% stat seems consist with a slight decline from 84% in 1997 and 70% in 2001: http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2001/112101/English_could_snowball_on_Net_1121 01.html However, only 36% of web users have English as their home language: http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3 This article supports that plus claims that sites offering more than one language will become the norm (but no references cited to support claim): http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9906/14/nonenglish.idg/index.html Thsi article supports that by 2003 only 26% of users will be native English, yet thinks English web pages could snowball: http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2001/112101/English_could_snowball_on_Net_1121 01.html So when considering language, a distinction must be made between users percentages and web pages percentages. Throughout history, the #1 factor in evolution is economic (or suvive proper). This is why English is dominating as the global language. This is what globalization is. I do not disagree with the hypothesis that China has potential due to population to be the largest market in terms of population. However, it is a long way from being a technology leading language. Probably never. And I think Spanish population is very close if not larger than Chinese (all Spanish speaking countries grouped) and they have the advantage of access to US markets (economics (survival) drives evolution). Tangent, I also found these interesting stats on "Measuring the web": http://decweb.ethz.ch/WWW5/contents.htm#3 http://www.msnbc.com/news/309085.asp -Shelby Moore
Received on Wednesday, 18 December 2002 22:13:29 UTC