Number of Internet users by language (pic) | Hacker News Reader

Number of Internet users by language (pic)

newscientist.com

24 pointsiamelgringo20 comments

Let me point out the obvious; that is, the title of this submission is slightly misleading as this is not a chart of the number of internet users by language, it's a chart of the number of internet users by country of residence. There's no such language such as "US" or "UK", and while there are many notable differences, I wouldn't consider UK English and US English different languages. Obviously, there's also no "Indian" or "Chinese" language.

My bad. I wrote the title in haste. Sorry about that. The image also leaves out Latin America/Spanish Internet users.

Misleading. Having lived in China I can tell you that an Internet user there is nowhere near equivalent to an Internet user in the US in terms of how often and to what extent they use the Internet.

For a more relevant breakdown of sophisticated Internet users by country see: http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/

Another interesting metric would be open source projects per capita.

Brazil Number of Internet users: 67,500,000 Percentage of world's internet users: 3.4

India Number of Internet users: 60,000,000 Percentage of world's internet users: 5.2

Either the numbers are seriously messed up, or an Indian is worth 1.7 Brazilians

Having no Spanish speaking countries on the map makes that woefully incomplete. There are more native speakers of Spanish on Earth than English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_....

Why isn't there a subset of web traffic/application for Adult Content?

Perhaps urban myth, but I remember 5-10 years ago people would talk of large percentages of online content consisting of such material.

Very nice. But how come Brazil has more internet users than Germany and India but it shows as having a smaller percentage of the world's internet users?

Also: 67.5m is supposed to be 26% of Brazil's population, which would make it 260m. The CIA book's 2008 estimate for Brazil's population is only 190m.

Where's Russia?

Indeed! And why is it modded down? It would still be something like 80 mln, Ukraine and Belarus included.

Ukraine and Belarus are not Russia :)

EDIT: Usually Eastern and Central Europe are "forgotten" in these surveys and statistics...

Isn't it about languages, not countries?

When it's about languages, you count language users.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think majority of Ukraine and Belarus people speak russian only as a second language.

So we then we should count ukrainians and belorussians separately.

Russian is also an official language in Belarus, so you should count them in. Ukraine is a different story.

You're wrong:

If we're counting this by language, we should figure out how much Ukrainians (or Belorusians) use internet in russian language, primary, and how much don't; and then we should sum up those numbers. Everything else would be a speculation.

I guess this is a somewhat interesting chart, but it's got nothing to do with language except one unqualified prediction about what languages will dominate a future Internet.

Please title your post more appropriately.

Now, about the chart itself...

How did the authors fail to sample Russia - the most demographically significant userbase between N.A/Europe and China/India?

I was honestly surprised to see that email was only 6% of internet traffic. Also surprised to see gaming at only 2%.

They aren't traffic intensive, even if the number of messages/connections is vast.

Things can change for gaming if they move image rendering into the cloud (which I doubt would work)

if third world countries raise Internet Bandwidth and Speed and broaden the internet culture

China just doubled in size from 2006 to 2008.

Very interesting, the Internet field is still booming...

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