From Telegraph Blogs (link):
On Monday David Sifry of blog search engine Technorati posted his latest update on the state of the blogosphere.
As well as showing that blogging continues to grow at a frightening pace – one new blog every second – David had some interesting data on the language of the blogosphere.
English speakers, arrogant bunch that we often are, would probably assume that most blogs are in English but we’d be wrong.
Though David warns that it’s hard to provide exact figures, Japanese appears to be the most popular language for blogs – at 37 per cent – followed by English (31 per cent) and Chinese (15 per cent).
Those numbers show how English speakers, who tend to be bad at learning a second language, could soon find themselves at a disadvantage online. When we do learn a second language it tends to be French or German, neither of which are on the radar as far as the blogosphere is concerned.
But it isn’t just the blogosphere we should worry about – the internet at large is being divided along language lines.
The latest figures show that there are around 300 million English-speaking internet users compared with just over 100 million who speak Chinese. However, internet usage in China is growing at a terrific rate and it won’t be long before the Chinese internet is bigger than its English-language counterpart.
