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Report: Chinese, Language of the Web by 2007

Posted on December 09, 2001

in News

by Isaac (isaac)

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Isaac

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User since: December 13, 1998

Last login: October 27, 2007

Articles written: 67

A report cited in a recent United Nations forum on multilingual Internet addresses suggests that Chinese will become the language of the web by 2007.

Presently, only a small majority of almost 500 million users are from English-speaking backgrounds, but the numbers throughout countries such as China are growing quickly.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) says that in 2002, the majority of Internet users will have a non-English language as their favoured tongue.

A brief report is available on the Financial Times site.

Searching the WIPO site revealed no immediate confirmation of the forecasted statistics.

 

isaac
www.triplezero.com.au

Isaac is a designer from Adelaide, South Australia, where he has run Triplezero for almost a decade.

He was a member and administrator of evolt.org since its founding in 1998, designed the current site, and was a regular contributor on evolt.org's direction-setting discussion list, theforum.

On the side, he runs Opinion, Hoops SA, Confessions, Daily Male, and Comments, as well as maintaining a travel gallery at Bigtrip.org.
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Additional Information

Submitted by OKolzig37 on December 11, 2001 - 08:14.

This information came via a ITU/WIPO conference on multilingual domain names held in Geneva on December 6-7, 2001. There are some briefing papers available on their web site (Microsoft Word and PDF formats only) that contain mostly information regarding multilingual domain names, but the beginnings of the articles contain some high-level information regarding the internationalization of the internet. These papers can be found here:

http://www.itu.int/mdns/briefingpaper/index.html

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Thanks

Submitted by isaac on December 11, 2001 - 17:12.

Thanks for the added info. This page listing the presentations from various countries might be of specific interest for everyone.

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Unicode and stats

Submitted by jasonnolan on January 3, 2002 - 14:25.

The last time I checked, China had pulled up to the level of Japan with 7.2% of the sites... sometime during this year. The problem, as I know it, has to do with Unicode. Which though it does more than any other encoding, still only includes half of the chinese characters. More than enough for causual and biz use, but still... do you want only half your language represented? Someone decided that we didn't need 32bit unicode, and that only 16 was fine.

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While usage has certainly

Submitted by cianuro on January 13, 2007 - 10:59.

While usage has certainly increased in China, the uptake of broadband throughout the US and Europe has kept things fairly as even as when this article was written. Wonderful to read over predictions made 6 years ago and see how it turned out. Dave Davis

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