1 billion internet users are English or Chinese speakers

The chinese (and arabigan and russian) rise

On 30 June 2010 there where in the world almost 2 billion internet users. Half of them were english and chinese speakers. China, as it happened in other fields such as economy, has been rapidly increasing its internet penetration in the country. As a result of that, the growth of chinese language internet users has been exponential since year 2000, with an increase of 1,277%. It is also following this trend the arabigan (+2,500% increase) and russian community(+1,825%). This means that english is “loosing terrain” in language presence in the internet.

There is a missing 17,8% of users (350,5 million) who currently are surfing on the net and who speak a different language, not reflected in the graph.

Wikipedia (en) vs Hudong (cn)

As an example of the evolution of the chinese presence on the internet we can have a look on Wikipedia. Currently, Wikipedia has over 3,5 million articles written in english. Hudong, which means “interaction” in Chinese, the largest wiki-based encyclopedia in the language since its founding in 2005, is currently hosting over 4,7 million articles written in chinese.