Global internet usage

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Internet usage in percent (2007)
Internet usage in percent (2007)
CIA figures for world internet use c.2002-3
CIA figures for world internet use c.2002-3

This article is for information relating to the number of people who use the Internet by language, nationality, geography, class, etc.

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[edit] Total number of Internet users

As of December 2007, approximately 1,319,872,109 people worldwide use the Internet, according to Internet World Stats.

[edit] Languages used on the Internet

The most-used language on the Internet is English. Although the total number of native English speakers in the world is about 322 million, English is spoken as a second language by up to 1.2 billion people around the world. They make their contributions to the Internet in their own language as well as in English.

Chinese is the most spoken native language on Earth, and the second language on the Internet. The Chinese population online is increasing at a high rate; this is expected to have a great impact on the Internet in the near future.

Notably absent from the table below is Hindi, the most widely spoken language in India, the second most populated country in the world. This is due to preference for English among most users having Internet access. The Indian population online is also increasing at a high rate; this is also expected to have a great impact on the Internet in the near future.

The figures in the table below were taken from Global Reach [1]. These are estimates, for September 2004, of the world online population per language.

Position Language Users (m) Users Total Population (m) GDP (b) World Economy GDP Per Capita
1 English 295.4 35.2% 508
2 Chinese 110.0 13.7% 874 $6,328 13% $7,200
3 Spanish 86.0 12% 410 $2,500 8.9% $7,100
4 Japanese 67.1 8.4% 125 $3,400 8% $27,200
5 German 55.3 6.9% 101 $2,679 5.8% $26,800
6 French 33.9 4.2% 100 $1,517 4.2% $19,700
7 Korean 31.3 3.9% 78 $887 2% $11,400
8 Italian 30.4 3.3% 62 $1,251 3.6% $20,100
9 Portuguese 29.4 3.3% 176 $1,487 3.6% $8,400
10 Russian 22 2.7% 167 $822 1.8% $4,900
11 Malay 14.2 1.8% 229 $258 2%
12 Dutch 14.0 1.7% 20 $575 $28,500
13 Arabic 13.5 1.7% 300 $678 1.6% $4,200
14 Polish 9.6 1.2% 44 $359 $8,100
15 Swedish 7.7 9 $237 $26,300
16 Thai 60 46 $406 $8,800
17 Turkish 6.8 67.4 $431 $6,400
18 Vietnamese 5.8 84
19 Persian 4.6 64 $84
20 Romanian 4.4 26 $108 $4,200
21 Czech 3.8 12 $121 $10,000
22 Hebrew 3.8 5.2 $132 $21,000
23 Danish 2.9 5.4 $171 $31,700
24 Finnish 2.8 6 $142 $23,600
25 Hungarian 2.5 10 $96 $9,600
26 Greek 2.4 12 $189 $15,800
27 Catalan 2.4 6.6
28 Norwegian 2.1 5 $136 $27,200
29 Slovak 1.8 5.6 $47 $8,700
30 Serbo-Croatian 1.0 20
31 Ukrainian 0.9 47 $115 $2,300
32 Punjabi 0.8 38
33 Slovenian 0.8 2 $22.90 $10,900
34 Icelandic 0.2 0.3 $6 $23,500
World Total 801.4 6460 $41,400

[edit] See also

[edit] External links