Second from the top: Russian has become the most popular language on the web after English

A few days ago, new data was published on which languages are the most popular on the Web. This chart shows the percentage of websites that use different content languages.

Thus, English is used on 63.6% of all websites in the world, and it is unlikely that anyone will be able to challenge this leadership in the foreseeable future. And then suddenly there was the Russian language. This means that the Russian information environment occupies the second place in the world in terms of importance, and by a decent margin from other languages. Just as unexpectedly, the Turkish information environment was in third place.

In contrast, the most populous country in the world, China, has only 1.3% of the world's information environment, behind even Vietnam.

If we assume that the present and future of the world lies in the information environment, then China has no chances for leadership, but Russia has them, you just need not to miss them with harmful foreign and archaic domestic policies, experts are sure.

Online content on the World Wide Web is consumed in thousands of different languages.

Some are more common than others, but it's interesting to see that the use of a language on the Internet doesn't always reflect the number of people who speak it. For example, Hindi is the third most spoken language in the world, but it is not among the most popular languages used on the Internet.

By the way, compared to last year, English has taken another step towards strengthening its leadership, in 2021 it was used on the Internet by 60.4% - or about six million of the top 10 million websites. Not surprisingly, it is also the most widely spoken language in the world, with over 1.13 billion speakers.

Chinese is spoken by 14.3% of the world's population (more than 1.11 billion people), and on the Internet it continues to lose ground: last year it was used by 1.4% of the 10 million most popular websites, that is, more than than in this.

Experts argue that the Russian language is ranked second in part due to the significant online presence of Runet , the Russian-speaking Internet community. In addition, it is also the official language of many countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.

A summary of the 20 most popular languages on the Internet compared to their actual usage among the world's population can be seen here.