[LINK] Arabic and the net

[Kim Holburn]

On 2009/Dec/15, at 1:33 AM, Jan Whitaker wrote:

> At 09:45 AM 15/12/2009, Roger Clarke wrote:
>
>> [I failed to quickly find a table of languages showing estimated
>> numbers of first-language speakers, largest first.]

Why first language?  I would have thought second language speakers are  
just as important, given English now has more second language speakers  
than native speakers.  Also with Chinese and Arabic, as I understand  
it, both are widely used as written languages by people who cannot  
understand each other's spoken language.  They would learn this  
written language at school so it would be a second language in many  
ways.  Even to many native Mandarin speakers the written language is  
much more different to the spoken than English.  I would have thought  
that literacy is a more important factor than spoken language for  
internet penetration.

> Believe it or not, this topic was on The Rich List on Sunday.
>
> Mandarin is first.

Many Mandarin speakers speak Mandarin as a second language but almost  
all have written Mandarin as their first written language.

> Cantonese is high.

Almost all literate Cantonese read and write in Mandarin.  There is a  
written form of Cantonese but it's very rare.

> English is way high as is
> Spanish. Surprisingly, Portuguese is 3rd. Hindi I think was 6th.
> Interestingly, the contestants said Indonesian and it wasn't on the
> list because the real language is Javanese.


On 2009/Dec/14, at 11:15 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> The initiative to boost use of Arabic on the Web was launched on  
> Monday
> following the domain name registration, which opened the Internet to
> millions of Arabic speakers put off by a language barrier.
>
> Analysts say Arabic is just 1 per cent of Web content.

Internet world stats says it's 17%

-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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