Abstract
The social networking market research site Inside Facebook has some intriguing language stats. In July, the fastest-growing languages on Facebook were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French. The Portuguese growth rate was a staggering 11.8%. Arabic grew by 9.2%, Spanish by 8.1% and French by 7.5%. With growth rates of 5.6%, 5.2% and 3.5% respectively, Chinese, German and Italian were also growing faster than English with 3.4%. Turkish (1.6%) and Indonesian (1.4%) also made it into the 10 fastest-growing languages on Facebook. These 10 fastest-growing languages are the same as the most frequently used languages on Facebook – although the ranking among the top 10 Facebook languages is quite different. In terms of the most frequently used languages on Facebook, English tops the list by a wide margin with 52% of all Facebook users setting their language to English. Spanish comes a distant second with 15%, followed by French (5.7%), Turkish (5.3%), Indonesian (5.0%), Italian (3.9%), German (2.7%), Chinese (2.3%), Portuguese (1.4%) and Arabic (0.8%). Even with their high growth rates, it will obviously be a while before Portuguese and Arabic make it into the top 5.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Specialist publication | Language on the move |
| Publisher | Language on the move |
| Publication status | Published - 2 Aug 2010 |
Bibliographical note
Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Keywords
- 200401 applied linguistics and educational linguistics
- 200405 language in culture and society (sociolinguistics)