New numbers from internetworldstats.com, now for May 2011

I'm not sure exactly when the numbers on internetworldstats were changed, but I think it must have been within the last month as I usually end up checking their numbers every few weeks or so.

The last post I wrote on their numbers was here, and as before the image they have is older than the numbers below so it's easy to compare. Last time the comparison was between December 2009 to June 2010; this time it's June 2010 to May 2010, a full year.

Strangely, the only numbers that have changed since that time have been English, Chinese and Spanish:

English: 537 million to 565 million (+27 million)
Chinese: 445 million to 510 million (+65 million)
Spanish: 153 million to 164 million (+11 million)

Either very few countries have released census data since that time (unlikely) or the site owners have neglected to factor this in (much more likely, unfortunately).


Another interesting source for online languages is this one:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all

which analyzes websites themselves, not countries and their populations. It begins thus:

English	56.1%
German	6.6%
Japanese	4.9%
Russian	4.8%
Spanish, Castilian	4.6%
Chinese	4.4%
French	4.1%
Italian	2.2%
Portuguese	2.1%
Polish	1.5%
Arabic	1.2%
Dutch, Flemish	1.1%
Turkish	1.1%
Swedish	0.7%
Persian	0.6%
Czech	0.6%
Korean	0.4%

Something about it does not seem right, however. Persian and Czech with 50% more content than Korean, and Swedish with almost twice as much? Highly unlikely.