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.
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