February 25, 2011: With over 420 million Internet users, and 20 percent of the planet's population, it should be no surprise that Chinese has become the largest native language group (at 22.6 percent) of worldwide Internet users (now over two billion people). In the last ten years, English speaking Internet users increased 2.8 times, while the Chinese speakers went up 12.8 times. English is second at 22.3 percent, followed by Spanish (7.8 percent), Japanese (5 percent) and Portuguese (4.2 percent, mainly because of Brazil).

English is still the dominant language on the net, with 42 percent of users able to use that language. While English is the common language of science and technology, the majority of Internet users, and especially new users, are not techies. Thus the majority of new web pages appearing on the web are not in English.