Lingua franca of the Internet

Chinese To Be Most Popular Language On Internet : Discovery News: "We take it for granted that the most popular language on the Internet is English, since, after all, the Internet was an American creation. But thanks to the huge number of Internet users that China is adding each year, English will soon be replaced by Chinese as the most popular language on the Internet. (Just to clarify: People in China speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Min and an abundance of dialects, but the written language across the board is Chinese).

Last year, China added 36 million Internet users, bringing their total to 440 million users. The United States only has 220 million Internet users, but English is spoken in more countries than China, and so more websites are published in that language.

That shouldn't be much of a surprise, with China becoming an increasingly powerful country. China is now the largest space polluter and produces more greenhouse emissions than the United States, contributing to global warming.

The Next Web put together a pretty neat infographic about the most popular languages on the Internet based on information from Internet World Stats, an Internet marketing firm."