Internet: most common languages online by users 2017

The statistic shows the most common languages on the internet, by number of internet users. As of March 2017, English was the most popular language online, representing 952.1 million worldwide internet users. Chinese was ranked second with 763.3 million online speakers. The top ten languages accounted for 77.5 percent of global internet users.

Most common languages used on the internet as of March 2017, by number of speakers (in millions)

Characteristic	Online language users in millions
English	952.1
Chinese	763.3
Spanish	293.8
Arabic	173.5
Portuguese	155
Malaysian language	154.7
Japanese	118.5
Russian	104.5
French	100.6
German	83.9
Other	839.7

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Release date

June 2017

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

as of March 31, 2017

Special properties

Internet users who speak the respective language

Supplementary notes

The source assigned only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach). No adjustments have been made for infants or illiteracy in the Internet penetration rate calculations.

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