Only 4% of languages are used online

And what percentage of people in the world uses one of the languages in that 4% as their primary language? I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s a really large percentage, probably a majority of the world&#x27;s population. It&#x27;s not really useful to look at the <i>percent of languages</i> when they vary in the number of speakers by so much (and there&#x27;s a long tail of languages with a vanishingly small number of speakers).

We parsed a lot of the data from App reviews (about 100 million) in different countries. Languages used are predominantly skewered toward english or other european languages. For example, in Israel, 51% of all reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew.<p>Writeup on major countries: <a href="http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-store-reviews-can-tell-you-about-foreign-language-app-users/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sensortower.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;27&#x2F;what-apple-app-s...</a>

I guess the title &quot;Only 240 languages are used online&quot; doesn&#x27;t sound like a problem? That probably represents 5 or 6 of 7 billion people?<p>I think the world should move towards even fewer languages than 240. However, it would be very sad if we didn&#x27;t capture the complete grammar, vocabulary, etc. of those other languages before they die, along with lots of audio, to preserve them.

I&#x27;d bet a large portion of these languages don&#x27;t even have official written languages. Some of the Chinese languages have tens of millions of native speakers and even they have no standardized way of writing their languages. When you start getting into languages that are specific to a tribe or very local area, the odds seem pretty low.

The www.jw.org website (Jehovah&#x27;s Witnesses website) is translated to 316 languages atm, which is on par with the article&#x27;s claim (170 actively used + 140 borderline cases). You can disagree with the site&#x27;s message, but it tries to do a good job into sending the message to people all around the world in different languages. In comparison though, JW publications are printed in 600+ languages, so there&#x27;s still lot to do for the website.<p>Edit: Going into &quot;publications&quot; section, there&#x27;s a picker which lets you select a language from total of 538.

I hope the research cited is better, because the article makes a complete hash of mixing interface language, script and language actually used to communicate. All of these are thrown together as &quot;use of language on digital stuff&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s quite common around the world to use an interface in language X (because the options are limited) but communicate in their own language. (I personally do it all the time, so much so that I prefer an English interface over one in my own language for the sake of consistency.)<p>Lack of support for certain kinds of script may be an issue, but that never becomes clear from the article. If the data is heavily based on the formal support for languages (instead of actual usage) then it&#x27;s seriously skewed. And even if it isn&#x27;t, the article doesn&#x27;t tell us where the actual problem is.

I can&#x27;t decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

&quot;A language’s Wikipedia presence was one of the most important indicators of its ability to leap into the digital age.&quot;<p>Which made me curios to search for and find Vicipaedia <a href="http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;la.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima</a>, it&#x27;s in the 10k+ article category.

I would rather focus on the many opportunities technology and the internet offers to preserve those 6000+ languages that are currently not being used online. It&#x27;s not very bold to say that technology will prevent them from disappearing completely unlike many languages in history that were not persevered.

That statistic is somewhat misleading. Or, at least, not very meaningful. A more meaningful statistic would acknowledge the different &quot;weights&quot; that certain languages carry (i.e., &quot;how many people use it&quot;).

These types of discussion about language always reminds me of <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/15108609" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;node&#x2F;15108609</a> which I find a fascinating read.

I don&#x27;t think wikipedia is such a great way to decide on a language. A better way is things like chat messages, but they are harder to analyze.

As someone who lives in an area where language is extremely political, and government is already involved in language-related legislation in day-to-day life, I worry that this is a potential vector for more government intrusion on the Internet. The excuses are practically built-in, from the perspective of the nationalists.

And here is a map of where they are used on Twitter<p><a href="http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/qianz/MapTwitterLanguage/v1/index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ccs.neu.edu&#x2F;home&#x2F;qianz&#x2F;MapTwitterLanguage&#x2F;v1&#x2F;inde...</a>

Useless things die out - it&#x27;s a natural process.

I wouldn&#x27;t wonder why there is only 4%. There are thousands and thousands of languages allover the world.

Are most languages really a big loss? I suppose there are some interesting variations in grammar, but what else? What can we learn from some obscure languages?

I really agree on this..