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 | % of all | Internet Users | Internet | Language Growth | |
30.4 % | 427,436,880 | 21.0 % | 201.1 % | ||
16.6 % | 233,216,713 | 17.1 % | 622.0 % | ||
8.7 % | 122,349,144 | 27.1 % | 395.7 % | ||
6.7 % | 94,000,000 | 73.8 % | 99.7 % | ||
4.8 % | 67,315,894 | 16.4 % | 451.8 % | ||
4.5 % | 63,611,789 | 66.0 % | 129.6 % | ||
4.2 % | 59,810,400 | 16.7 % | 2062.2 % | ||
4.1 % | 58,180,960 | 24.3 % | 668.0 % | ||
2.5 % | 34,820,000 | 47.9 % | 82.9 % | ||
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 % | |
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.
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