efore taking over
the whole planet. Then people from all continents began
connecting to the internet and posting webpages in their own
languages. In the 1990s, the percentage of English decreased
from nearly 100% to 85% (reached in 1997 or 1998, depending on
the sources).

In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies
(language translation services) and the Internet Society - ran
the first major study relating to distribution of languages on
the web. The results were published in June 1997 on a webpage
named Web Languages Hit Parade. The main languages were English
with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with
1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with
1.0%.

In July 1998, according to Global Reach, a company specializing
in international online marketing, the fastest growing groups
of internet users were non-English-speaking: Spanish-speaking,
22.4%, Japanese-speaking, 12.3%; German-speaking, 14%; and
French-speaking, 10% - with 56 million non-English-speaking
users. More than 80% of all webpages were still in English,
whereas only 6% of the world population spoke English as a
native language (16% spoke Spanish).

Randy Hobler was a consultant in internet marketing for
Globalink, a company specializing in language translation
software and services. He wrote in September 1998: "85% of the
content of the web in 1998 is in English and going down. This
trend is driven not only by more websites and users in non-
English-speaking countries, but by increasing localization of
company and organization sites, and increasing use of machine
translation to/from various languages to translate websites."

Randy also brought up the concept of "language nations":
"Because the internet has no national boundaries, the
organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by
the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have
virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language
Nations'... all those people on the internet wherever they may
be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus,
the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin
American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the U.S., as
well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco."

Robert Ware created OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996, as a
"fast finder" of words in hundreds of online dictionaries. He
wrote about an experience he had in 1994, that showed the
internet coul