s
year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace the
growth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a
'World Wide Web'."

According to Global Reach, a branch of Euro-Marketing Associates, an
international marketing consultancy, there were 56 million non-English-
speaking users in July 1998, with 22.4% Spanish-speaking users, 12.3%
Japanese-speaking users, 14% German-speaking users, and 10% French-
speaking users. But 80% of all webpages were still in English, whereas
only 6% of the world population was speaking English as a native
language, while 16% was speaking Spanish as a native language. 15% of
Europe's half a billion population spoke English as a first language,
28% didn't speak English at all, and 32% were using the web in English.

Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cyberie", a
weekly French-language online report of internet news. He wrote in
August 1999: "We passed a milestone this summer. Now more than half the
users of the internet live outside the United States. Next year, more
than half of all users will be non English-speaking, compared with only
5% five years ago. Isn't that great? (...) The web is going to grow in
non-English-speaking regions. So we have to take into account the
technical aspects of the medium if we want to reach these 'new' users.
I think it is a pity there are so few translations of important
documents and essays published on the web - from English into other
languages and vice versa. (...) In the same way, the recent spreading
of the internet in new regions raises questions which would be good to
read about. When will Spanish-speaking communication theorists and
those speaking other languages be translated?"

Will the web hold as many languages as the ones spoken on our planet?
This will be quite a challenge, with the 6,700 languages listed in "The
Ethnologue: Languages of the World", an authoritative catalog published
by SIL International (SIL: Summer Institute of Linguistics) and freely
available on the web since the mid-1990s.

The year 2000 was a turning point for a multilingual internet,
regarding its users. Non English-speaking users reached 50% in summer
2000. According to Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in
December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 (including
34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians), and 64.2% in
March 2004 (including 37.9% non-English-speaking Europ