Rest of World turned to W3Techs, a web-scanning firm based in Austria, to count all of the publicly accessible web addresses on the internet to get hard numbers on the discrepancy. Our data shows that a little more than half the sites on the web use English as their primary language. That’s a lot more than one might expect, given that native English speakers only make up just under 5% of the global population. Meanwhile, Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most-spoken languages in the world, but the same scan found they account for just 1.4% and 0.07% of domains, respectively.
I’ve felt after learning this sort of thing, that no matter what bad may have happened, the world owes the British Empire a great debt of gratitude for spreading the language globally.
Without a global empire spreading a single language to every corner of the world, pretty much all the modern tools of communication would still be much more limited because we’d be a bunch of little enclaves of various languages instead of having a commonly understood one to communicate with.
I wouldn’t say great debt of gratitude; it reduces the score.