INTERNET WORLD USERS BY LANGUAGE
Top 10 Languages

Internet World Stats presents its latest estimates for Internet Users by Language
Because of the importance of this research, and due to the lack of other sources, Internet
World Stats publishes several tables and charts featuring analysis and details here below
for the top ten languages and also for the detailed world languages in use by country.

Examples for interpretation of the data:
- There are 99,182,000 Japanese speaking people using the Internet, this represents 4.7 % of all the Internet users in the world.
- Out of the estimated 126,475,664 population of the world that speaks Japanese, 78.4 % use the Internet.
- The number of Japanese Speaking Internet Users has grown 110.7 % in the last eleven years (2000-2011).
 
Tallying the number of speakers of the world's languages is an increasingly complex task, particularly with the push in many countries to teach English in their public schools. How many people can actually use the global language? David Graddol estimated a total of 750 million L1 (first or native language) plus L2 (second or nth language) speakers of English in his Future of English Report (pdf document) for the British Council. One of our subscribers, Martin Schell, has reviewed Prof. Braj Kachru's new book Asian Englishes which claims that India and China combined have over half a billion "users" of English.

Indeed, many people are bilingual or multilingual, but here we assign only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach). No adjustments have been made for infants or illiteracy in the Internet penetration rate calculations. Very few countries have 100% literacy. Australia, Denmark, Finland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Norway are six countries to mention. Regarding children, most are early Internet adopters (when they are given the chance to surf).