Languages on the Web - A Timeline

[Ross Clark]

The compiler of this recently posted a note about it to LinguistList.

https://marielebert.wordpress.com/2024/10/15/languages-web-timeline/

Some here may find it of interest, or worth comment.
It is, of course, mainly historical, but Wikipedia has some interesting
current figures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

[Aidan Kehoe]

Post by Ross Clark
The compiler of this recently posted a note about it to LinguistList.
https://marielebert.wordpress.com/2024/10/15/languages-web-timeline/
Some here may find it of interest, or worth comment.

Great to put names to the founders of various sites that I have known and used
for years. I note an inaccuracy:

“January 2008:
Unicode superseded ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
as the main encoding system on the web.
Unicode (first published in January 1991) provides a unique number for every
character, no matter the platform, the program and the language. The 16-bit
encoding allows the processing, storage and interchange of text data in any
language, while 7-bit ASCII (first published in 1963) can only process
English, with 8-bit variants of ASCII (first published in 1986) for a few
languages with diacritics.”

By that point most of the Unicode on the web was UTF-8, which can represent
up to 1.1 million code points and did at that point represent 99,024 code
points, more than a 16-bit encoding can.

Post by Ross Clark
It is, of course, mainly historical, but Wikipedia has some interesting current
figures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

I’m a little surprised Chinese isn’t higher in those figures.