Most common languages used on the internet 2020

As of January 2020, English was the most popular language online, representing 25.9 percent of worldwide internet users. Chinese was ranked second with a 19.4 percent share. The Spanish language was the third most used language online. The top ten languages accounted for 76.9 percent of global internet users.

English as the leading online language

USA and India, the countries with the most internet users after China, are also the biggest English- speaking countries in the world. As a result, most of the information online is created in the English language. In this case, even the users for whom English is not the mother tongue might use it for convenience. Besides, English is often chosen as a common communication language between people of different nationalities. The large share of Chinese-language content is due to the fact that China was the country with the most internet users worldwide, as of the first quarter of 2021.

Global internet usage by regions

As of November 2021, the estimated number of internet users worldwide was 4.9 billion. Among the global regions, Asia was leading with more than a half of global internet users, an estimated 2.7 billion, as of March 2021. Europe was the second region, by the number of internet users, flowed by North America. Regarding internet penetration rates worldwide, Northern Europe was leading as of April 2021, with 97 percent of the population accessing the internet.