Is It True That More Than Half of Web Contents Are in English? Not If Multilingualism Is Paid Due Attention!

Abstract

The belief that English is and will remain largely dominant as the first language of the Internet in terms of content and is the natural lingua franca in cyberspace plays against the mobilization of human and funding resources to incorporate minority languages. We sustain that this belief stands on biased data and that multilingualism is more and more the nature of the Internet and translation its lingua franca. We challenge the validity of a source widely used, since 2011, to state that English represents a steady percentage of web contents over 50%. This business source, W3Techs, is well-famed and considered reliable for its surveys on web technologies, exploring a large sample of the Web. However, languages differ from other web technologies, in the fact than more than one language could be used on a website. Not taking into account the multilingual nature of the Web is a serious bias that leads to major errors. The study of the rate of multilingualism of the sample of websites used by W3Techs concludes that the percentage of English contents on the Web is within a 20%–30% range, a value coherent with the results from three referenced alternative methods. We plan for 2025 to create a tool for measurement of languages and rate of multilingualism in a series of websites, with thorough attention to list all the languages used within a website, a complex matter. This tool will be applied to the same sampling and should close definitively this matter.