More than half of the internet is in English.
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.
Read more: Business Insider