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While English is in fact the best bet if you want to maximize your potential audience online, its global footprint is not as large as one might think.
According to estimates from Ethnologue, a research centre for language intelligence, roughly 1.46 billion people speak English around the world, of which roughly 380 million are native speakers.
That makes English the most spoken language worldwide when including non-native speakers, ahead of Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by roughly 1.14 billion people worldwide, including 940 million native speakers.
The 1.46 billion people who speak English still make up less than 20 percent of the world population, meaning that roughly 4 in 5 people in the world are unable to understand 50 percent of all websites, at least without a translation tool.
Some widely-spoken languages, such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, are underrepresented on the internet, while others such as English, German and Russian have a larger footprint online than they have in the real world.
Mike, I did the math, ignoring Gib and Falks I end up with 412M
332 (- 42) + 21 + 25 + 5 +5 + 67 (-1)
All numbers from google.
So it is a little more, not far more. The surprising number is probably 42M Spanish native speakers in US
Given some US restaurants try to accurately emulate Faulty Towers, I can quite believe there are 42M Spanish speakers in the US. But I suspect many aren’t legitimately there. (cue Eddie 🙂
But I totally forgot the Caribean, Malta, Fiji, Singapore and Belize. Plus of course about 5% of people in Southern Africa and quite a few in India are native English speakers.
“roughly 1.46 billion people speak English around the world, of which roughly 380 million are native speakers.”
Population of USA (- natives & Spanish migrants) + Canada (- Quebecois) + Australia + NZ + Gib + Falks + Eire + UK (- Geordies) is far more than 380 million.
Plus significant chunks of South Africa, Singapore, etc where English is a first language.