On Russian Internet Day, September 30, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ’s webinar was held at the VK account of the Safe Information Environment for Childhood project. Together with ccTLD Chief Analyst and Chair of the Russian task force on universal acceptance Maria Kolesnikova, we talked about various aspects of multilingualism on the internet, both from the user and technical points of view.
The meeting opened with interesting statistics: Maria noted that today over 65 percent of the world population has access to the internet. The main share of users are in Europe, North and South America, as well as Southeast Asia.
“About 2.7 billion people do not use the internet. The largest numbers of disconnected people are once again found in Southeast Asia: this indicates that the potential of this region remains untapped, and we expect that a new billion users will mainly come from this region, as well as from African countries. Some countries with deep penetration of information technologies also have untapped reserves,” Maria Kolesnikova noted.
In total, there are over 7,000 national languages in the world, though this number also includes endangered dialects and languages used by communities of up to several hundred people. The most popular national languages are: English, which is used by about 1.5 billion people around the world (while it is native to only 400 million); Chinese with 1.1 billion people (and it is the mother tongue for the vast majority of Chinese speakers); followed by Hindi in terms of prevalence (it is used by almost 700 million people); Russian holds the ninth place in this ranking: it is used by 255 million people around the world.
It is no secret that the internet was born and developed for a long time in the English-speaking environment, so the ranking of languages in terms of the content produced in the net comes as no surprise. As of March 2024, 50.8 percent of websites are in English, and all other languages account for 49.2 percent, with the top five being Spanish (5.7 percent), German (5.1 percent), Japanese (4.6 percent), Russian and French (4.3 percent each).
“It is also noteworthy that Russia has an average level of English proficiency: 41st out of 113 countries and regions; only five percent of the population speak English fluently, as VTsIOM reported in 2019. We know that today Russian users spend online 6-7 hours per day, using both smartphones and desktops. They feel comfortable largely because they can use their mother tongue to communicate, search for content, and study various materials. According to scientists, using a second language that is not our native is a very big burden on the brain, and if used constantly, it quickly makes us feel tired,” Maria Kolesnikova said.
Convenient use of the internet and software, as well as the growth of the internet audience speaking thousands of different languages, makes the issue of supporting digital multilingualism a priority in the development of online services. The areas include the internationalization of internet addressing, that is, the use of Unicode characters in the domain name system (for example, in the .РФ ccTLD or the public domain .ДЕТИ) and in email addresses, as well as the Universal Acceptance, which is designed to make all domain names and email addresses work in any software applications. Find out more about the five criteria for software compliance with universal acceptance, software and services that work correctly with Russian-language domains and emails, the «Поддерживаю.РФ» educational project, as well as the index of global competitiveness of the Russian language - in the video recording of This Multilingual Internet! webinar.
