Good news for IAL advocates: Internet use increasing rapidly in Latin America

Spanish.

It seems that Google has commissioned a study on the growth of the Internet in Latin America and the numbers are very promising for people like me that believe there need to be a fair number of strong languages in the world besides English for people in English-speaking countries to even consider the idea behind languages like Occidental - because the more English looks like the uncontested winner the less likely people will be interested in learning other languages, and IALs most of all. What the world needs is a linguistic stalemate.

Here are a few numbers from the article:

A recent marketing study of 10 Latin American nations and Puerto Rico projected the regional residential base of Internet users would reach 160 million in five years, up from more than 100 million now.

and:

In 2007, for example, Colombia added 5.4 million Internet users, or about 12 percent of its population of 45 million, according to a Morgan Stanley report. This represented an 80 percent increase in the number of Colombia's Internet users that year.

The same report said that Brazil added 7.4 million Internet users in 2007 (17 percent growth); Mexico more than 2.2 million (an 11 percent increase) and Venezuela 1.58 million (38 percent growth).

In contrast, the United States added 9.8 million net Internet users that year, for an increase of 5 percent.

and:

When results are finalized for 2008, Google expects revenue growth from Latin America to reach around 120 percent down from 165 percent in 2007, Hohagen said. Even so, he added, revenue expansion in the fourth quarter of 2008 was still the highest in the world for Google divisions.

Finally:

Yahoo, with portals offering local content in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, is projecting 30 percent growth in Latin American Internet users for 2009, compared with a 10 percent increase in the U.S. Hispanics market and 5 percent for the U.S. market as a whole, according to Armando Rodriguez, general manager of Coral Gables-based Yahoo! Hispanic Americas.

Every once in a while I check internetworldstats.com to see how things are progressing with the chart of top ten internet languages, though they haven't updated since June 30 last year. On that chart Spanish has moved up into third place from fourth place about two years ago when Japanese was third. Hopefully they update soon.

Here's part of the chart:

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	29.4 %	430,802,172	21.1 %	203.5 %
Chinese	18.9 %	276,216,713	20.2 %	755.1 %
Spanish	8.5 %	124,714,378	27.6 %	405.3 %
Japanese	6.4 %	94,000,000	73.8 %	99.7 %
French	4.7 %	68,152,447	16.6 %	458.7 %
German	4.2 %	61,213,160	63.5 %	121.0 %
Arabic	4.1 %	59,853,630	16.8 %	2,063.7 %
Portuguese	4.0 %	58,180,960	24.3 %	668.0 %
Korean	2.4 %	34,820,000	47.9 %	82.9 %
Italian	2.4 %	34,708,144	59.7 %	162.9 %
TOP 10 LANGUAGES	84.9 %	1,242,661,604	23.8 %	278.3 %
Rest of the Languages	15.1 %	220,970,757	15.2 %	580.4 %
WORLD TOTAL	100.0 %	1,463,632,361	21.9 %	305.5 %

The languages with high populations and low internet penetration are the ones that are able to achieve the most growth, but only in countries where there is a certain amount of stability and progress of course. Latin America does extremely well on both counts. A place like Sub-Saharan Africa however has a lot of French speakers but little economic growth and so the potential there remains untapped.

Languages like German, Japanese and Italian on the other hand don't have much more growing to do. Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world so the entire country is already saturated with internet users, but up north there are another 23 million people that speak the language and don't have access to the internet.