Looking at a map of French and Spanish-speaking countries doesn’t always make clear the number of people who are speaking, reading, and publishing material in a given language. This morning I looked at some new WordPress statistics, indicating their latest number of bloggers in various languages, and here is what I found:
Where in the world is WordPress.com used?
We host WordPress blogs written in over 120 languages. Below is a break down of the top 20 languages – even though English is the biggest, we’re seeing some of the fastest growth in non-English speaking places (Indonesia, Germany, France, Turkey, etc):
English: 69%
Spanish: 10%
Portuguese: 6.6%
Italian: 2.4%
Turkish: 1.5%
German: 1.4%
Indonesian: 1.4%
French:1.2%
Polish: 1.1%
Swedish: 0.9%
Farsi: 0.8%
Romanian: 0.8%
Dutch: 0.5%
Vietnamese: 0.5%
Polish: 0.4%
Greek: 0.4%
Arabic: 0.3%
Finnish: 0.2%
Norwegian: 0.2%
Thai: 0.1%
Lately I’ve been wondering about the usefulness of French, since my daughter speaks French, and will probably be living in America later on. Of course Spanish is more useful in the United States than French, but I had no real feeling which was more dominant worldwide. Seeing this morning’s WordPress statistics (even though it is a limited view) makes it much more clear to me. (Looking at this list, I wonder why none of the Chinese languages are in the top twenty with WordPress?)
Expat 21
Tags: French, Publications in French, publications in Spanish, Spanish, Spanish Trumps French, usefulness of French, usefulness of Spanish
January 10, 2009 at 6:36 pm
This is a very interesting list – English followed by Spanish would probably reflect the relative positions of the two most widely spoken languages, but then it becomes more intriguing. Why more Swedish than Norwegian and Finnish – and if these Scandanavian languages make it into the top 20 why not Danish ? Why is Dutch in the top 20 when so many Dutch people speak English and could reach a wider audience blogging in English than Dutch ? I’m not surprised Spanish is above French, but I am surprised to see Italian at almost double the percentage quoted for French.
Any suggestions/comments from other readers of this blog ???
January 10, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Her French will certainly make it easier for her to learn Spanish!
I wonder if censorship/difficulty of access is the reason for Chinese not turning up in that top 20?
Whenever I click on ‘Next blog’ at blogger to browse at random, I seem to hit Portuguese-language blogs far more often than Spanish.
January 11, 2009 at 10:33 am
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January 12, 2009 at 12:29 am
Re: Chinese, perhaps because blogging software such as wordpress is blocked in China thanks to the `’great firewall”? My sister lives there (China) but has to send things to my or our family to post on her behalf.
January 15, 2009 at 9:07 am
That’s very interesting. Some of my expat friends and I were wondering why China was not in the top languages, and in fact wondering if WordPress was blocked there, or if there was some sort of firewall.
Expat 21
January 22, 2009 at 4:25 am
This does come as a surprise to me. Only 1.2% of WP blogs in French
I expected French to be atleast equal to Spanish in terms of the number of blogs. I’m also surprised to see Russian missing from this list. I’m sure the mainland Chinese don’t have full access to WP!
February 6, 2009 at 6:30 am
Another point to consider is how technologically-inclined people are. It could be that it so happens that more Spanish-speaking people are inclined to create blogs. It does not necessarily mean that Spanish is a more “universal” language (although I think that it is really spoken more around the world than French).
February 26, 2009 at 11:24 am
Yes, more blogs are written in Spanish than French. But to the author of this link let me remind you that there are more website articles written in English and French followed by German, Italian, and even Japanese, and Polish than Spanish like in Wikipedia.
Besides, non-Hispanics never use Spanish with other people with different language as lingua franca.
French is still considered as a world lingua franca particularly Europe wherein it’s the language most likely to be used as a common language in case one of the speakers does not speak English.
March 22, 2009 at 3:24 pm
hey there, Spanish is a much better language to learn right now because the population of hispanics are growing very rapidly, and soon there will be more hispanics in the U.S than americans.
November 7, 2009 at 11:15 am
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