Language

The prevalent language for communication on the Internet is English. This may be a result of the Internet's origins, as well as English's role as a lingua franca. It may also be related to the poor capability of early computers, largely originating in the United States, to handle characters other than those in the English variant of the Latin alphabet.

After English (28.6% of Web visitors) the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (20.3%), Spanish (8.2%), Japanese (5.9%), French and Portuguese (4.6%), German (4.1%), Arabic (2.6%), Russian (2.4%), and Korean (2.3%).[12]

By region, 41% of the world's Internet users are based in Asia, 25% in Europe, 16% in North America, 11% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 3% in Africa, 3% in the Middle East and 1% in Australia.[9]

The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of Unicode, that good facilities are available for development and communication in most widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of foreign language characters, also known as kryakozyabry) still remain.