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1997 > 82.3% OF THE WEB IN ENGLISH
[Summary] The internet was born in 1974 in the U.S. before spreading to the English-speaking community and then worldwide. This explain why it took a little while for other languages than English to be distributed. The first major study about language distribution on the web was run by Babel, a joint project from the Internet Society and Alis Technologies to contribute to the internationalization of the internet. The results were published in June 1997 in seven languages on a webpage named "Web Languages Hit Parade". The main languages available on the web were English with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%. Three years later, in spring 2000, non-English-speaking internet users reached 50%, with a percentage steadily increasing then.
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The first major study about language distribution on the web was run in 1997 by Babel, a joint project from the Internet Society and Alis Technologies to contribute to the internationalization of the internet.
The internet was born in 1974 in the U.S. before spreading to the English-speaking community and then worldwide. This explain why it took a little while for other languages than English to be distributed. People from all over the world began to have access to the internet, despite a connection that was far from cheap in a number of countries, and to post webpages in their own languages. The percentage of webpages in English slowly decreased from nearly 100% in 1983 to 85% in 1997.
“Towards communicating on the internet in any language…” was the subtitle of Babel, launched in 1997 as a plurilingual website in seven languages (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish), with information about the world's languages and a typographical and linguistic glossary. A section named "The Internet and Multilingualism" gave information on how to develop a multilingual website, and how to code the "world's writing".
Babel ran the first major study relating to distribution of languages on the web. The results were published in June 1997 in seven languages on a webpage named “Web Languages Hit Parade”. The main languages of the web were English with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.
According to Randy Hobler, a consultant in internet marketing for language translation software and services, interviewed in September 1998: "85% of the content of the web in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend is driven not only by more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by increasing localization of company and organization sites, and increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to translate websites.”
Randy also explained in the same email interview: “Because the internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'… all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the U.S., as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco."