Most English speakers automatically assume that English is the language of the internet, but the figures show that this isn’t actually true. While the internet may have been born speaking the English language, today there are at least 34 languages of note used online, and native English-speakers account for only a third of all web surfers worldwide.
This ratio is going to tip further and further towards multilingualism as time goes on and internet accessibility improves around the world, as the number of web pages in languages other than English steadily climbs to surpass those in the internet’s ‘lingua franca’. Projects like the EU-funded ‘Multilingual Web’, organized by the W3C, are recognizing this shift in the status quo, and are working towards ways to make the web more accessible for people of all languages.
Your average website designer should be aware of this shift. Not long ago, if you had ten domains or sub-domains in different languages, that made you a ‘global website’. Today the baseline is more than 20.
If you’re not a major multinational company, though, it’s unlikely you’re going to have the resources or impetus to build 20 different localised websites with different languages and designs. There are, however, certain things you can do that will make your English-language site more accessible to people from all cultural backgrounds.
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