Purnendu Chatterji intrigued me today by saying, that Bengali is the 5th largest spoken language in the world. Well, I looked it up ... 1. Mandarin: 1 Billion+ 2. English: 508 Million 3. Hindi: 497 Million 4. Spanish: 392 Million 5. Russian: 277 Million 6. Arabic: 246 Million 7. Bengali: 211 Million 8. Portuguese: 191 Million 9. Malay-Indonesian: 159 Million 10. French: 129 Million Here are the languages that just barely missed the list (from the most popular to the least): German, Japanese, Urdu, Punjabi, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Cantonese, Wu, Vietnamese, Javanese, Italian, Turkish, Tagalog, and Thai. Why do we care? Because, the Media industry is moving online, and a question that is looming large: what other languages besides the obvious ones like Mandarin, need major Internet presence? The list above starts to provide some indicators ... Key question to answer: Which of these languages have sustainable (a) Internet Presence (b) Online Advertising Pull behind them? Today, English, Mandarin, French, and Spanish have traction. German and Italian also have some Internet presence. Big languages like Hindi and Bengali, by virtue of the fact that they belong to a largely bilingual population that is fluent in English - have little adoption. Even online advertising dollars are largely limited to North American target audiences, with a small bit of traction in the UK and Western Europe. No one wants to advertise to audiences in Brazil or Russia. It would be interesting to watch how the game changes in the next decade. |
