How many people use Turkic languages online?

Friday, June 20, 2008


Internetworldstats.com is usually a pretty good place to go to get general information about how many people of each language are using the internet at present. It's not a perfect system because it assumes that people are unilingual and isn't able to measure L2 speakers (but to be honest there isn't a method out there to measure them all accurately), but very good overall. Here for example are the top ten languages on the internet:


Top Ten Languages Used in the Web
( Number of Internet Users by Language )

TOP TEN LANGUAGES
IN THE INTERNET

% of all
Internet Users

Internet Users
by Language

Internet
Penetration
by Language

Language Growth
in Internet
( 2000 - 2008 )

English

30.4 %

427,436,880

21.0 %

201.1 %

Chinese

16.6 %

233,216,713

17.1 %

622.0 %

Spanish

8.7 %

122,349,144

27.1 %

395.7 %

Japanese

6.7 %

94,000,000

73.8 %

99.7 %

French

4.8 %

67,315,894

16.4 %

451.8 %

German

4.5 %

63,611,789

66.0 %

129.6 %

Arabic

4.2 %

59,810,400

16.7 %

2062.2 %

Portuguese

4.1 %

58,180,960

24.3 %

668.0 %

Korean

2.5 %

34,820,000

47.9 %

82.9 %

Italian

2.4 %

33,712,383

57.9 %

155.4 %

TOP 10 LANGUAGES

84.8 %

1,194,454,163

22.9 %

263.6 %

Rest of the Languages

15.2 %

213,270,757

14.6 %

556.7 %

WORLD TOTAL

100.0 %

1,407,724,920

21.1 %

290.0 %


So there it is, English is number one, Chinese is second, Spanish is third. Interestingly, French has been moving up percentagewise as well thanks to Sub-Saharan Africa I assume.

But how many Turkic languages are there? Azerbaijan for example counts as a separate language but anybody who knows Turkish can read almost anything in Azeri after picking up a few important words. So let's check all the Turkic-speaking people in the world.

(data from the end of 2007)

First Turkey: 16 million internet users.
Then Cyprus: 356,000, probably more Greek than Turkish, so let's say 100,000 or so.
Azerbaijan: 1 million.
Turkmenistan: 64,000.
Uzbekistan: 1.7 million.
Kazakhstan: 1.2 million.
Kyrgyzstan: 300,000.
Then there's Bulgaria with 2.2 million users: I think the Turkish-speaking population there is about 9% but let's go with 5% to be on the safe side: 110,000.

Then there are people that know Uyghur, Tatar and so on, but I have no idea how to calculate that. Going just with the numbers we have here, we have a total of 20.474 million. On the top ten list we see that Italian has 33.7 million users online, so two thirds of that.

Usage growth is another matter entirely however. Turkish has grown 700% over the past five years online compared to 151% for Italian.

No conclusions, just numbers.

0 comments:

  © Blogger templates Newspaper by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP