It is almost impossible to imagine picking up our phones and not having an English keyboard or not being able to simply googling something in English and to have an infinite number of websites to choose from. For speakers of indigenous languages/dialects, however, the reality is very different.
A survey carried out by UNESCO in 2008 discovered that 98% of websites are in only 12 out of the nearly 7000 languages that exist. Over half of these are in English with 60.4% (around 6 million) of the top 10 million websites using English as their primary language. Russian is the second most used language online appearing in 8.5% of the top 10 million websites, a stark drop from that of English.
Russian’s presence online is mainly due to Runet, the internet’s Russian language community, and Russian being an official language of countries once considered part of the Soviet Union.
There seems to be little correlation between the number of speakers of a language and its prevalence online. For example, although Hindi is the third most spoken language in the world, other languages such as Vietnamese and Persian are more commonly found on the top 10 million websites.
English is thought to have been the first language used on the Internet and, by 1980, it made up 80% of online content.
Perhaps it's good news that English’s influence online has shrunk over the years. From once being the sole dominant language of the internet, its competition from French, Spanish, German, and Mandarin has decreased its presence online by about 30%. In particular, Mandarin has experienced a massive growth of 1277.2% between 2000 and 2010. It is this growth which has pushed it firmly into the rankings of one of the top 10 most used languages on the internet.
Although English may not be as prevalent online today as it once was in the past, the lack of linguistic diversity online continues to pose a great threat to the existence of indigenous languages, making it increasingly harder for speakers of these languages to access material online in their mother-tongue. While there may be around 6000 languages actively spoken today, the top 10 most spoken languages in the world make up 82% of all material on the internet, rendering linguistic diversity online as almost non-existent.
Facebook is the most multilingual social media platform, offering 111 different languages.
The process of creating a healthy balance between the different languages used online will take decades if not centuries to transpire - some, however, aren’t willing to wait this long. In 2018, the French President Emmanuel Macron made it clear that there needs to be more use of French online and pledged to spend hundred of millions of euros to encourage the use of French online.
Unfortunately, for those that speak one of the many thousands of languages that are scarcely found online, preserving and speaking their language is even harder.
"The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people"
Tim Berners-Lee
The lack of linguistic diversity online is highlighted through the fact that, while Google recognises 30 different European languages, only one African language makes the cut while Indigenous American and Pacific languages miss out completely.
You can only Google search in just over 130 different languages.
For the last 18 years, UNESCO has dedicated their time to encouraging multilingualism online. Its primary focus has been on introducing more indigenous languages to the internet. However, there are undoubtedly many obstacles in their way to achieving this goal.
Many lesser-known languages don’t have an oral form and consequently lack a standardised orthography, which, quite obviously, makes it very difficult to provide materials online for such languages. Consequently, those who speak lesser known languages face a decision: they could either not use any form of technology, or they use another language which is supported by technology. The problem with the latter is that it only exacerbates their situation.
“When I get on the internet I find more than 90% of the content in English and a significant percentage in Spanish and other languages, what I have to do is to move to another language, and that favours the displacement of my own language. It discredits my own language, because—as it is not on the internet—then it is not valid, then it does not work, therefore why am I going to continue learning it? Why am I going to teach it to my children if, when I turn on the internet or television, I cannot find it there?”
Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Kumez, member of the Kaqchikel Mayan community from Guatemala and an organiser of the Latin American Festival of Indigenous Languages on the Internet
More than 80% of articles on Wikipedia are written by people from Europe and North America.
Another problem is the limited access to the internet in certain parts of the world. According to Internet World Stats, just 58% of the population of the world are able to successfully access the internet.
Although around 76% of those who have access to the internet live in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, the vast majority of online material does not originate there.
It is believed that less than 5 percent of all languages will ever be regularly used online.