Digital Media and Global Language Change

The internet's early growth was disproportionately shaped by English, reflecting the language's dominance in the American computing and telecommunications infrastructure from which the World Wide Web emerged in the early 1990s at CERN, and surveys by the web-technology analytics firm W3Techs have repeatedly found that English accounts for roughly half of the content on measured websites even though native English speakers make up well under ten percent of the world's population, a gap explained partly by English's continuing role as the default language of technical documentation, software interfaces, and international business, and partly by the outsized number of non-native speakers who use English as a second language for online publishing. Even so, that English share has been gradually declining relative to its peak in the 1990s as internet access has spread further into non-English-speaking regions, with Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Persian, and, increasingly, Chinese-language content accounting for growing shares of measured global web traffic and publishing over the past two decades.