Language used in commercial Websites
The results of a study carried out for the European Commission, DG XIII, within the framework of the multiannual programme to promote the linguistic diversity of Europe in the Information Society, have recently been published. The aim of the study was to address the question of whether English was the predominant language used on commercial Websites in Europe. The results of the study indicate that national languages are predominant, with the use of English in second place. A random sample of about 1% of European Websites opened by companies were chosen from each Member State, no academic nor non-profit Websites were visited. The results obtained indicate that there is a high percentage of commercial Websites in national language only. A high number of sites in the Nordic countries were in national language only (60% in Sweden, 50% in Denmark, 47% in Finland and 42% in the Netherlands). Outside English speaking countries, only Flemish-speaking Belgium (47%), Greece (35%) and Luxembourg (30%) revealed a high share of English only Websites. No English-only Websites were detected in France or French-speaking Belgium, and only 3% in Spain. The highest share of multilingual commercial sites (more than two different languages) were found in Luxembourg (60%). The two preliminary conclusions drawn from the report indicate that the World Wide Web is leaning towards strong regionalisation and that companies approach the WWW from a non-global commercial perspective. In addition, the results of the study indicate that the WWW is quickly transforming the Internet into a real mass-market which will probably soon start to develop peculiar national or regional characteristics in terms of structure, offer, content and information deployment.