The Most Spoken Languages Online and Offline

February 21 marks International Mother Language Day, a date proclaimed by UNESCO and adopted by the UN to promote linguistic diversity around the world and underscore the role of languages in promoting inclusion. On this occasion, we took a look at the most widely spoken languages on the internet, i.e. those most represented on websites, and the most widely spoken languages in real life around the globe.

According to estimates from Ethnologue, a research center for language intelligence, roughly 1.53 billion people speak English around the world, including native and non-native speakers. That makes English the most spoken language worldwide, ahead of Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by roughly 1.18 billion people worldwide. In third position comes Hindi, spoken by around 609 million people. The 1.53 billion people who speak English still make up less than 20 percent of the world population, meaning that more than 4 in 5 people in the world don't understand English.

As our infographic highlights, the reality is quite different on the internet. According to figures from DataReportal's most recent Digital Global Overview report, almost half (49.2 percent) of websites are written in English. Chinese ranks much lower in the hierarchy, accounting for only 1.1 percent of websites (13th place worldwide). There is also a considerable gap between the real world and the internet for Arabic, which is spoken by 335 million people worldwide (5th place globally) but remains significantly underrepresented on the web, accounting for less than 0.5 percent of websites, which means it doesn't rank in the top 20 of most used languages online.