Is Chinese the new English? | Ĉu la ĉina estas la nova angla?

Hello everyone, this is Evildea, your God.

And today I'm investigating whether
Chinese is the new English.

Nonprofessionals tend to say that the
international language of the world

is already English, and the Internet
reflects that.

All other suggestions are not
considered seriously.

Of course we all already know

that more than 80% of the Internet
is in English, isn't it?

As an Esperantist, this question
is important to me.

So I decided to thoroughly investigate it.

I used a few sources during my investigation.

But mainly these two sources:

1) "Twelve years of measuring linguistic
diversity in the Internet",

a UNESCO document,

and 2) Internet statistics from
internetworldstats.com

Here are my problems:

To define what is a "speaker"
of any language.

To find suitable, verifiable
sources of information.

To find information about China.

Match up the various - and often
contradictory - sources of information.

In December 1995 during a summit about
France in Cotonou, Benin, Africa,

the news was published that 90% of the
Internet was in English.

This figure strongly aggravated
participants, who all complained

about inherent bias towards
users of English in the new Internet.

Funredes, a Spanish foundation for
the evolution of the Internet,

began to investigate the situation.

Immediatedly after, UNESCO also
began an investigation

about the language diversity of
the Internet,

which in total lasted more than
12 years.

This is my first source of information.

Essentially, however, the UNESCO study

only really investigated
European languages.

English, Spanish, French, Italian,
Portuguese, German and Catalan.

And at the start only English,
French and Spanish.

They didn't even consider Chinese.

So we cannot only use the
UNESCO report without

additional information to
prove the hypothesis.

This creates other problems.

Especially when you want to compare
data from many sources.

But I'll speak about that later.

The introduction to the report
illuminates the situation

about the use of English as follows:

This study presents a variety of methods
used over 12 years

to measure linguistic diversity on the Internet.

The results of the study dispel some
of the myths surrounding existing figures

for example, the dominant presence
of English on the Web.

After that, the report presents
problems which the team

had to solve to get current information.

The majority are boring
algorithmic problems,

but I found two of them interesting.

The algorithms mined data from
a few Internet search engines,

as a result the team soon found out

that search engines tend to prefer

one language, regardless of how
many languages it supports.

So Google has a tendency to
show English pages more often,

while Exalead, which at the start
of the study was

an important French search engine,

had a tendency to show French pages.

Search engines list fewer than 30%
of all pages.

So that supplies me with only
a fragment of the real

Internet language diversity.

So what is the result of the study?

First, you shouldn't forget that

the report is only about
a group of European languages,

not the whole world.

The report found the following:

Before 1995, 80% of all web pages
were in English.

At the conclusion of the study, in 2008,
only 40% of all webpages were in English.

The main reason for this
relative shrinking of the English

in the Internet seems to be that

the Internet has already reached

the majority of English speakers.

In 2007, 17.5% of the human race
was using the Internet.

Out of that, 5.5% of Internet users
were English speakers.

However, that percentage
still isn't entirely valid,

because the algorithms consider
websites to be in English

when the front page is in English.

So websites such as Google, Wikipedia,
Facebook are considered

as English websites despite
being multilingual.

UNESCO also studied the source
of English websites

and found a few interesting facts.

The USA produces 66% of all
English websites.

Britain produces 6.5% of
English websites.

Canada produces only 3.5%
of English websites.

And Australia, my country,

produces only 1.5% of all
English websites.

South Africa, New Zealand, India,
and China produce so few English websites

that they were not taken into account.

The only non-Anglophone country

which produces a large amount

of English websites is Germany,

which produces 1.2% of all websites,

almost more than Australia.

An interesting side fact -

97% of all websites in Africa
are produced by South Africa.

However, Africa in total only
produces 0.33% of all websites.

So it's useless to take Africa
into account

when you want to understand
the relationship

between French and English
around the world.

Probably you're now sitting there yelling

"Where is the information about Chinese?"

After that, I collected information

from InternetWorldStats.com

and Ethnologue.com to find out

the situation about Internet users

and native speakers of certain languages.

At last, we have information about Chinese!

Here are the results of my work.

This very beautiful infographic

shows the ten largest languages
of the Internet.

The infographic also supports

a few parts of the UNESCO document.

Firstly, it proves that the
French-speaking languages of Africa

are entirely missing from the Internet.

So in the future, perhaps French
will become an important language

in the Internet.

Secondly, it shows that German
has already reached its maximum size.

However, the most interesting difference

is between English and Chinese.

Currently there are more Internet users

who speak English than Chinese.

However, a large part of the
English speakers

are not native speakers.

I suppose that native speakers
of any language

are more productive in that language
than non-native speakers.

But that is an assumption without proof.

However, Chinese totally conquers English

when it comes to native speakers.

And if my assumption is correct,

the native speakers of Chinese
will probably produce

more material than the non-native
speakers of English.

So my conclusion is that English
remains an important language

of the Internet.

However, little by little, will
cede its prestige to other languages,

for example, Chinese, Arabic, French,
and Spanish.

However, that already has been happening
for more than ten years.

However, I finally conclude that Chinese,
little by little,

will become equally as important
as English in the future.

So, before I finish this video,

I just want to clarify that it's
not a scientific report,

understand it as you wish.

So if you liked this video,
"like" it, share it,

subscribe to my channel if you haven't
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and I'll see you all in the next film.

And if you're not there,

我要杀死你