III · Web content
Web content
Share of websites whose language could be identified. W3Techs, 3 October 2026. English alone is half the web.
Languages & Reach
Today's lucky color, drawn from the tarot. To decide which languages should carry its stories, we measured each language four ways: the people who speak it, the people online, the words on the web, and the hours spent there.
People who speak several languages, and sites written in several languages, are counted once for each language.
I · Speakers
The world's top 20 languages, in millions of speakers. Ethnologue 2026. Traditional and Simplified Chinese are counted once, as Mandarin.
II · Internet users
Share of all internet users. Internet World Stats, March 2020, which is still the latest published count of users by language. It lists only the top 10.
III · Web content
Share of websites whose language could be identified. W3Techs, 3 October 2026. English alone is half the web.
IV · Attention
People who mainly read the language online × average daily hours, in billions of hours per day. Claude's estimate from DataReportal 2025–2026 country figures. How India and the Philippines are split between languages moves these numbers a lot.
V · Where attention outruns content
Up: daily hours online. Across: share of websites. Both scales are logarithmic. The further up and left, the more time people spend online in that language compared with how much is written in it.
Arabic gets 2.3 billion hours a day online, yet only 0.6% of websites are in Arabic. Chinese, Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish sit on the same side. New languages should come from this upper-left corner.
Hindi (1.74 billion hours), Bengali, Urdu, Thai (510 million hours) and Filipino are not in the top 20 for web content (under 0.6%), so they would sit further left than this chart reaches.