Spanish on the Internet

Spanish continues to make its presence felt on the web. According to Spain's Fundación Telefónica and its project "The Economic Value of Spanish: A Multinational Company", Spanish remains in third position on the world wide web, behind English and Chinese which account for 50 percent of all users, with around 136 million users. This represents 33 percent of the Spanish-speaking population and 8 percent of internet users in the world.

Despite the gap between Spanish and the two most frequently used languages on the internet, the Spanish-speaking community has increased considerably in the last three years: according to Google, there are 681 million pages in Spanish, a figure which is only outstripped by English, with 9,890 million, and Chinese, with 806 million.

The productivity index of Spanish-speaking internet users, the result of the percentage of users of each domain and the percentage of web pages written in Spanish, increased from 0.99 percent in 2005 to 5 percent in 2009, more than that of Portuguese, Arabic, Korean and Chinese.

The profile of users of the 850 digital dailies in Spanish around the world is male and under the age of 45.

The increase experienced in Latin America is of particular interest for the evolution of Spanish on the internet:  between September 2006 and September 2009, the percentage of the population in the region with access to the internet doubled: from 15.1 percent of the population to 30.5 percent.

Source: Fundación Telefónica/Ariel Collection, "Spanish on the Internet" by Guillermo Rojo and Mercedes Sánchez, December 7, 2010, http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/en/prensa/noticias/noticia/debate yconocimiento/12_07_2010_spa