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English is losing its status as the universal language of the Internet

internet cafe computers china
An Internet café in Taiyuan, China.
REUTERS/Stringer

More than half of the internet is in English.

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But that percentage may decline in the future, according to research by Álvaro Blanco from Funredes, a nonprofit that studies technology usage in the developing world.

In 1996, Blanco's research estimated that 80% of online content was in English. Less than a decade later, he said it fell to 45%. These estimations don't even take into account activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, since search engines only index about 30% of the web, Blanco told Quartz.

But even though English's presence online is declining, the current lack of language diversity is a huge problem on the web.

Even people who speak the most popular languages have a hard time reading online. Chinese, the most widely spoken language, makes up just 2.1% of the internet. The world's second most widely spoken language, Spanish, encompasses 4.8% of the web.Hindi, spoken by 260 million people, makes up less than 0.1% of the internet.

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Organizations like UNESCO are worried that English's overbearing presence may drown out less popular languages. Activists argue that English's domination on the web could even contribute to the extinction of indigenous tongues.

Translation tools can help, however, and some experts believe machine learning will make online translation services incredibly accurate in the coming years. Within the next decade or two, all computers may have "language calculators" that interpret text with an accuracy level close to that of human translator, according to predictions by futurist Ray Kurzweil.

This technology, along with English's online decline, could create a more democratic web in the future.

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