Top 10 World Languages

Purnendu Chatterji intrigued me today by saying, that Bengali is the 5th largest spoken language in the world. Well, I looked it up …

1. Mandarin: 1 Billion+
2. English: 508 Million
3. Hindi: 497 Million
4. Spanish: 392 Million
5. Russian: 277 Million
6. Arabic: 246 Million
7. Bengali: 211 Million
8. Portuguese: 191 Million
9. Malay-Indonesian: 159 Million
10. French: 129 Million

Here are the languages that just barely missed the list (from the most popular to the least): German, Japanese, Urdu, Punjabi, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Cantonese, Wu, Vietnamese, Javanese, Italian, Turkish, Tagalog, and Thai.

Why do we care?

Because, the Media industry is moving online, and a question that is looming large: what other languages besides the obvious ones like Mandarin, need major Internet presence? The list above starts to provide some indicators …

Key question to answer: Which of these languages have sustainable (a) Internet Presence (b) Online Advertising Pull behind them?