Language Clash

While English has been the dominant language of online content for the past two decades, shifting demographics of technology usage, as well as changing national populations, means this dominant position may be relinquished in the next two decades.

A graph showing the Top Ten Languages in the Internet for 2010

The Internet is finally becoming a truly multilingual platform as new users join the network from developing markets, forming a linguistic long tail of content and communications.

The rise of Internet usage in Asia, South America and Africa is bringing millions of new users online each year, and with it a change to the balance of languages used in content and communication. Chinese language usage is counted among some 440 million users as of 2010, just behind the 550 million English language users online today. With peaking penetration in developed countries that count English as a major language, and major growth still to come in countries such as China, India, Brazil, and parts of Africa, the shape of content and communication will change as new languages take on more weight on the global network.

Signals:

ICANN, the body charged with managing Internet domains, switched on capabilities earlier this year for new multilingual domains, initially in Cyrillic for Russian, and Arabic. This is the first time non-Roman characters have been used in top-level domain names.
Google’s Eric Schmidt last year forecasted an Internet that will be dominated by Chinese language content in the next five years. Google and other search companies have made great strides in recent years developing non-English search technology, and Facebook has seen its growth explode worldwide as it adds native language versions of the dominant social network. 48% of Facebook content was estimated to be in languages other than English, with Turkish and Indonesian among the top six languages used on the network.
A study conducted in early 2010 showed only 50% of all Twitter messages are in English. Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish make up next most frequently used languages.

Implications:

Areas such as search and social media emerging in new languages will have a disruptive effect on the development of Internet content as these changes will reach into the semantics of these networks, from search engine optimization to advertising to content tagging and beyond. Advertising in particular will see significant changes in coming years to adapt to new languages.
Real-time translation will become an increasing necessity as users access material in other languages across the tightly integrated links of global platforms. Tools such as Google Translate, already offering automatic translation within the browser, and this is likely to be developed into additional tools that reside closer to the native content.
Technical considerations around domain management, content management and content design will have to take into account new character sets, such as Mandarin, Cyrillic and Arabic.

Countertrends:

The principal countertrends are primarily around growth of English language education worldwide, and the continued use of English as a neutral language among cultures. This won’t slow languages such as Chinese or Arabic as much, as many new users are coming from less educated social groups and rural regions less likely to use English as a bridge language.

Extrapolations:

Design accommodations, particularly for Chinese and Arabic, will begin to impact visual design on content and media. Spending power within these language groups will dictate the level of this change, from shifting page layouts to how extensive translation will be applied for English language audiences, if at all. This also applies to technologies such as e-readers, which will need both hardware and software accommodations to multiple languages.