Forum Moderators: open
| Optimizing global reach - the language-GNI method This discussion has been inspired by a question asked by a member in another thread. Bearing in mind that The table below is based on 1999 World Bank figures for GNI (gross national income per country), which have been totalled per native language and their respective share of the world economy computed. A 75% reach can be attained with just six languages - English, Japanese, German, Spanish, French and Italian. If reaching 2/3 of the world's population (incomewise) is enough, then only four languages are needed, English, Japanese, German and Spanish. In both cases, countries where English is the #2 language come as a bonus - e.g. the Nordic countries with 2,3% of the world economy. |
| Native language | Countries | Share of world income | Ack |
| English | United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa | 38,5% | 38,5% |
| Japanese | Japan | 13,5% | 52,0% |
| German | Germany, Austria, part of Switzerland, Lichtenstein | 8,3% | 60,3% |
| Spanish | Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Guatemala, Ecuador, Dominikan rep, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, Honduras | 5,7% | 66,0% |
| French | France, parts of Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland | 5,4% | 71,4% |
| Italian | Italy | 3,9% | 75,3% |
| Chinese | China, Hong Kong, | 3,9% | 79,2% |
| Portuguese | Portugal, Brazil | 2,8% | 82,0% |
| Dutch | Netherlands, part of Belgium | 1,8% | 83,8% |
| Russian | Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belorussia | 1,3% | 85,1% |
| The Language-GNI method is a simple one and does not take varying online populations into account. I suppose one should really do that if real money is to go into an international web project. It might change the order between Spanish, French and Italian, for one thing. Any thoughts on this, anyone? |
economy isn't the factor we all need to be looking at
in my case we simply need population online...since our service is free...I've set a student on placement the task of researching figures for online population around the world by language
up to now we've been using raw population figures...this gives languages like Bengali which have relatively few speakers online rather a high rating, but politically that has been good for us
data from [sil.org...]
when we've got the research on online population completed I'll post a digest up here
another vital figure one needs to look at is rate of growth both of GNI and online population
finally, one has to be careful with the figures for speakers of some languages...having the site in people's first language is a good thing, but languages commonly used as a second language are important too...that biases further towards English, French, German and Spanish...but it also raises the importance of both Russian and Chinese...it also adds Hindi and Arabic as major "players"
on our site we get Arabic rating as fifth most used of the translated pages
Updated figures for Europe are right here in this forum [webmasterworld.com]. Did the update myself last month.
Countries with Arabic as the native language would add up to 2,5% of total GNI and so deserve a place in the table above. Can one assume that the many dialects are the same when written? Is Hindi spoken outside of India (1,5% of world income)?
