The languages of the internet

English is the main language of about one internet user in four, but of about half of all websites. Chinese is the main language of one user in five, and of about one website in a hundred. Here is the whole picture, language by language.

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Internet users and websites by language

# Language Internet users (millions) Share of internet users Share of websites
1 English 1,186 25.9% 49.3%
2 Chinese 888 19.4% 1.1%
3 Spanish 364 7.9% 6.0%
4 Arabic 237 5.2% 0.5%
5 Hindi 200 (est.) 4.4% –
6 Indonesian / Malay 198 4.3% 1.0%
7 Portuguese 172 3.7% 4.1%
8 French 145 3.2% 4.5%
9 Japanese 119 2.6% 5.1%
10 Russian 116 2.5% 3.7%
11 German 93 2.0% 5.9%
12 Vietnamese 68 (est.) 1.5% 1.0%
13 Turkish 66 (est.) 1.4% 1.6%
14 Persian 65 (est.) 1.4% 1.1%
15 Tagalog 55 (est.) 1.2% –
16 Thai 54 (est.) 1.2% 0.3%
17 Korean 50 (est.) 1.1% 0.8%
18 Bangla 50 (est.) 1.1% –
19 Urdu 45 (est.) 1.0% –
20 Italian 43 (est.) 0.9% 2.8%
21 Polish 32 (est.) 0.7% 1.8%
22 Swahili 30 (est.) 0.7% –
23 Ukrainian 25 (est.) 0.5% 0.7%
24 Dutch 22 (est.) 0.5% 2.2%
25 Romanian 17 (est.) 0.4% 0.5%
26 Swedish 10 (est.) 0.2% 0.5%
27 Greek 9 (est.) 0.2% 0.5%
28 Czech 9 (est.) 0.2% 1.0%
29 Hungarian 9 (est.) 0.2% 0.7%
30 Hebrew 7 (est.) 0.2% 0.4%
31 Serbian 7 (est.) 0.2% 0.2%
32 Danish 6 (est.) 0.1% 0.4%
33 Afrikaans 6 (est.) 0.1% –
34 Slovak 5 (est.) 0.1% 0.4%
35 Bulgarian 5 (est.) 0.1% 0.3%
36 Finnish 5 (est.) 0.1% 0.4%
37 Norwegian 5 (est.) 0.1% 0.3%
38 Croatian 4 (est.) 0.1% 0.2%
39 Lithuanian 2 (est.) 0.0% 0.2%
40 Slovenian 2 (est.) 0.0% 0.1%
41 Belarusian 2 (est.) 0.0% –
42 Estonian 1 (est.) 0.0% 0.1%
43 Latvian 1 (est.) 0.0% 0.1%

Internet users: Internet World Stats, 31 March 2020 (ten largest languages); the others are FolioPress estimates on the same base, marked est. Indonesian and Malay are counted together. Share of websites: W3Techs, December 2025; – means under 0.1%.

Where the web doesn't speak its readers' language

Compare the two shares. English, German, Japanese and French have more websites than their share of users. Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and Indonesian have far fewer: hundreds of millions of people are online in those languages, and few websites speak to them. For a business, that gap is an opportunity.

Want to know what share of these users your own website speaks to? Check your language reach score

How these numbers are made

Internet World Stats estimates internet users by language for the ten largest languages (31 March 2020, 4.59 billion users in total). For every other language FolioPress offers, we estimated users the same way on the same 2020 base: each country's population times the share of people using the internet (ITU), in the countries where the language is mainly spoken. Together our estimates stay within the total Internet World Stats gives for all other languages.

Each person is counted once, by their main language, so the numbers understate languages that many people read as a second language, English first. The share of websites is how many websites use each language (W3Techs); a site in several languages counts for each.

Questions and answers

What are the most common languages on the internet?

By main language of internet users: English (about 26%), Chinese (19%), Spanish (8%), Arabic (5%), Indonesian and Malay (4%), Portuguese (4%), French (3%), Japanese (3%), Russian (3%) and German (2%). By share of websites, English leads with about 49%, then Spanish, German, Japanese and French.

Which language has the most websites?

English, with about half of all websites whose language W3Techs can tell. Spanish and German follow at about 6% each.

How many languages are used on the internet?

Thousands, but a few dominate: the ten largest are the main language of about three quarters of internet users, and fewer than 40 languages each appear on more than 0.1% of websites.

How many languages can a FolioPress site have?

Up to 44, each with its own translated addresses and hreflang: €12 a month for two languages, €19 for all of them.

Sources

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