According to Global Reach, a marketing consultancy promoting localization, there were 56 million non-English-speaking users in July 1998, with 22.4% Spanish-speaking users, 12.3% Japanese- speaking users, 14% German-speaking users and 10% French-speaking users. 15% of Europe's half a billion population spoke English as a first language, 28% didn't speak English at all, and 32% were using the web in English.
In summer 1999, the number of internet users living outside the
U.S. reached 50%.
In summer 2000, the number of internet users having a mother tongue other than English also reached 50%, and went on steadily increasing then. According to statistics regularly published online by Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 (including 34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians), and 64.2% in March 2004 (including 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians).
1997 > THE INTERNET, A TOOL FOR MINORITY LANGUAGES
[Summary] Despite the so-called hegemony of the English language, the internet was also a good tool for minority languages, as stated by Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, who has taught computing at the Institute Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on the Isle of Skye, in Scotland. Caoimhín has maintained the trilingual (Scotish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, English) college website, as the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, with a trilingual list of European minority languages. The internet could be a tool to develop a "cultural identity" for any language, while using the English language for this, as stated by Guy Antoine, who founded Windows on Haiti in April 1998 to promote the Haitian culture and language.
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Despite the so-called hegemony of the English language, the
internet was also a good tool for minority languages, as stated by
Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, who has taught computing at the Institute
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on the Isle of Skye, in Scotland.
Caoimhín has maintained the trilingual (Scotish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, English) college website, as the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, with a trilingual list of European minority languages.
Interviewed in August 1998, Caoimhín saw four main points for the growth of a multilingual web: “(a) The internet has contributed and will contribute to the wildfire spread of English as a world language. (b) The internet can greatly help minority languages, but this will not happen by itself. It will only happen if people want to maintain the language as an aim in itself. (c) The web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big demand for this. (d) The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual.”
How about the Gaelic language? Caoimhín wrote in May 2001: "Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell-checking, a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic — the first software of this size available in Gaelic."