Foreign Media: Internet Language Distribution, English Dominates, Chinese is Severely Imbalanced
According to 2025 Ethnologue data, English dominates the internet with a 45% URL share, but English native speakers only account for 4.6% of the global population, showing a serious disproportion between influence and population size.
The following is a comparison of each language's URL share and native speaker percentage: German 7% (0.9%), Russian 6% (1.8%), Chinese 5% (16.3%), Japanese 5% (1.5%), Spanish 4% (5.9%), French 4% (1.0%), Other Languages 21% (covering 68.1% of the global population).
The most concerning imbalance is Chinese - 16.3% of the global population speaks Chinese as their native language, yet it only accounts for 5% of URLs. Spanish is also imbalanced, with 5.9% native speakers but only 4% of URLs. German, on the other hand, shows an inverse imbalance, with less than 1% native speakers but a URL share of as high as 7%.
68.1% of the global population speak languages that have almost no representation on the internet, which is particularly detrimental to indigenous communities, as their cultures face the risk of being technologically assimilated.
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1860056544936009/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author alone.