Most popular language statistics

Early on I realized English speakers make only 4% to 27% of the world's population (depending whether you count non-native speakers), so within two weeks of the first BleachBit release, I added internationalization support. Since then generous volunteers have translated BleachBit to 32 languages, and BleachBit is used by people speaking more languages than I can remember. Ideally BleachBit would be fully translated to every native language. Until then, well do its translation it serve people now?

The most readily available data about who uses BleachBit is from the web site. Over the last two months, visitors from 44 different languages have visited BleachBit web pages hosted on Blogger, SourceForge, and Google App Engine, but using the 80/20 rule, 82% of the top visitors come from only four languages: English, Spanish, Italian, and German. All these translations are mostly complete, which is a success.

(Keep reading. There's more after this long table.)

Table summarizing BleachBit's translation statistics against web visitors

The population statistics are thanks to Wikipedia.

Language

% of Visitors to BleachBit Web site

% of BleachBit translated

World Population (millions of people)

English

58.422%

N/A

350

Spanish

10.311%

100

350

French

7.408%

89

77

German

6.310%

99

105

Italian

5.993%

100

70

Portuguese

2.171%

100

200

Dutch

1.444%

99

22

Polish

1.127%

90

40

Russian

0.969%

99

164

Korean

0.880%

84

78

Chinese

0.880%

98

1300

Hungarian

0.865%

84

15

Czech

0.529%

99

12

Swedish

0.361%

88

10

Greek

0.307%

0

15

Turkish

0.297%

83

70

Catalan

0.252%

89

8

Japanese

0.237%

0

130

Bulgarian

0.188%

84

12

Romanian

0.188%

83

24

Danish

0.138%

58

6

Finnish

0.099%

32

6

Norwegian Bokmal

0.114%

57

5

Indonesian

0.064%

99

250

Slovak

0.064%

100

7

Thai

0.054%

29

75

Croatian

0.049%

99

6

Basque

0.045%

0

1

Lithuanian

0.045%

0

3.5

Estonian

0.040%

0

1

Slovenian

0.040%

0

2

Arabic

0.025%

87

5

Serbian

0.020%

38

12

Afrikaans

0.015%

0

7

Hebrew

0.015%

100

7

Galician

0.010%

83

4

Ukrainian

0.010%

99

45

Icelandic

0.005%

0

0.3

Kurdish

0.005%

0

26

Macedonian

0.005%

0

3

This success has its limits. Two failures are Greek (15th most popular on the web site, 15 million native speakers) and Japanese (18th place, 130 million native speakers) which have no BleachBit translation—none!

Other than two three languages, BleachBit is well translated to the most popular languages visiting the web site. The top twenty languages visiting BleachBit cover 99% of the visitors and represent 46% of the world's population (3 billion people).

Of course statistics "lie." First, not all language groups have equal access to computers and the Internet, so using world population numbers has limited meaning. Second, the statistics based off the BleachBit web site are biased: all the BleachBit web pages are currently in English, and 59% of the visitors here consider English their native language (much higher than the world population). In other words, the web site doesn't represent all BleachBit users, and I know many users download BleachBit from other, non-English sites. Also, even though the BleachBit application is fully translated to dozens of languages, the web site is only in English, which is a failure. If BleachBit and its web site were translated to other languages, probably those speakers would visit it more. Basically, the web site is not a great source of data on the "demand" for translations.

Finally and most importantly, the individual end user does not care how many other people speak his language—whether there are a billion or just his family—and he cares even less how many of them visit the BleachBit web site. The individual is just as important as the many, and he simply wants an application which he can easily understand.

BleachBit translations have shortcomings, but you can help: translating BleachBit is easy.

Comments

your numbers are way off english is down over 10 million to an estimated amount of 340 million while spanish has gone up over 25 million to an estimated amount of 375 million. the rest of your figures are pretty close give a take a range of 5 million

Very insightful, nice analysis.

And no, the number are not very off, considering it's just a estimation.

By the way, thanks for BleachBit , it's awesome!

The population estimates are from Wikipedia (as noted in the article), so feel free to update them. "Citation needed"! :)

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Andrew, lead developer