Arabs online have witnessed a whopping 2,000% increase in population over the past 9 years rendering Arabic as the 8th top language used on the web at 2.9%.
Internet World Stats has published these results also showing that only 17.3% of Arabic speakers have internet access, the lowest amongst the top 10. This means that there’s a remarkable growth opportunity for content creation catered towards Arabs.
The stats, however, do not show what the users’ preferred language is. Arabic speakers might prefer reading content in English or French. In fact, while Arabic speakers are comfortable reading a political news article in Arabic, they might check the technical specs of a mobile phone in English.
The study was conducted based on an exclusive one-language per user approach. In other words, English speaking Arabs would not count as English users.
What the stats do confirm is that if you were to launch a campaign talking to all Arabs, you might want to keep your print ads, radio and TV commercials running alongside.
Enough analysis, let’s look at the figures.
Top Ten Languages on the Internet (in millions of users)
Top Ten Languages Used in the Web (Number of Internet Users by Language)
| TOP TEN LANGUAGES IN THE INTERNET |
Internet Users by Language |
Internet Penetration by Language |
Growth in Internet ( 2000 – 2009 ) |
Internet Users % of Total |
World Population for this Language (2009 Estimate) |
| English | 478,442,379 | 37.9 % | 237.0 % | 27.6 % | 1,263,830,976 |
| Chinese | 383,650,713 | 27.9 % | 1,087.7 % | 22.1 % | 1,373,859,774 |
| Spanish | 136,524,063 | 33.2 % | 650.9 % | 7.9 % | 411,631,985 |
| Japanese | 95,979,000 | 75.5 % | 103.9 % | 5.5 % | 127,078,679 |
| French | 78,972,116 | 18.6 % | 547.4 % | 4.6 % | 425,622,855 |
| Portuguese | 73,052,600 | 29.5 % | 864.3 % | 4.2 % | 247,223,493 |
| German | 64,593,535 | 67.0 % | 133.2 % | 3.7 % | 96,389,702 |
| Arabic | 50,422,300 | 17.3 % | 1,907.9 % | 2.9 % | 291,798,743 |
| Russian | 45,250,000 | 32.3 % | 1,359.7 % | 2.6 % | 140,041,247 |
| Korean | 37,475,800 | 52.7 % | 96.8 % | 2.2 % | 71,174,317 |
| TOP 10 LANGUAGES | 1,444,362,506 | 32.5 % | 363.5 % | 83.3 % | 4,448,651,771 |
| Rest of the Languages |
289,631,235 | 12.5 % | 487.1 % | 16.7 % | 2,319,153,437 |
| WORLD TOTAL | 1,733,993,741 | 25.6 % | 380.3 % | 100.0 % | 6,767,805,208 |
Additional details are available via Internet World Stats.
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