Written on May 1st, 2006 at 10:05 pm by Darren Rowse
Non English Posts make up over Two Thirds of Total Blog Posting
What is the most common language used by bloggers?
It might surprise some to know that it’s not English but Japanese according to David Sifry. English comes in second with Chinese third.
The interesting thing is that Japanese is on the rise in the last six or so months. In November 05 it made up 31% of posts, in January 06 it made up 32% and now it’s up to 37%. English makes up under a third of total posts.
Of course this measures total numbers of posts in these languages and not numbers of bloggers - perhaps Japanese write a lot more posts per day than English speaking bloggers but I suspect it says more about the international state of the blogosphere - something that doesn’t get a whole heap of attention.
Anyone want to translate ProBlogger into Japanese?
28 Responses to “Non English Posts make up over Two Thirds of Total Blog Posting”
Simone
May 1st, 2006 11:25 pm
Hi!
Mmm, very interesting!
I also think it’s interesting that Dutch is up there with the big guns, even though only about 18 million Dutch people speak Dutch, and then another few million Belgiums….
All the other languages are from countries that have way more people, or have several countries speaking that language. Anyway, it doesn’t suprise me actually, the Dutch are quite technlogically advanced etc.
Anyway, don’t click on the above website link(my blog) unless you can read dutch, ha ha!
groetjes ;-)
Simone
Perth, Australia
Sergio
May 1st, 2006 11:43 pm
Well I must say that I’m really surprised by this figures. I thought that about 60% of the posts in blogs were written in english.
This also states that putting an effort on writting in another language rather than english may pay in the near future.
I’ll keep writting on my mother tongue (portuguese) and hope for that.
Shaun Carter
May 1st, 2006 11:50 pm
This is quite interesting. I also thought more postings would be in English, but I suppose with the ever increasing participation of other countries in the Internet, we will only see the level of diversity increase in the future.
DavidC
May 2nd, 2006 12:03 am
On Friday I had a site called mobile01.com link to one on my articles, and brought in some decent traffic. Problem is, the site was from Taiwan. There was no English language version of the site, and you can only get a rough feeling for the content by running it through one of the online translators. Obviously their readers were at least capable in English, left me pretty humbled being barely fluent in that language myself.
I was completely clueless as to how to respond to or welcome the readers, much less trying to monetize the traffic. It really left me wondering the same thing, how much money am I leaving on the table by restricting my site to only English speaking readers.
Liam Daly
May 2nd, 2006 12:08 am
Sifry did say around the time of his last State of the Blogosphere report that Japanese bloggers post much more often than most places, preferring multiple very short posts over the more common approach of a single post per day in on average in the English-speaking world.
Razib Ahmed
May 2nd, 2006 1:11 am
In this list you cannot find any South Asian language. Until now, the problem with South Asian languages like Bengali (Bangla) and Hindi are that they did not have very good support in the operating systems and browsers. With the release of Windows Vista this scenario will change and suddenly you will see a huge increase in the South Asian languages. For example, Bengali has 250 million speakers.
SouthAsiaBiz
May 2nd, 2006 3:04 am
Not many blogs in South Asian languages
These days, Indian companies, Indian professionals and Indian students are creating havoc in the outsourcing world. Still, in the blogging world, South Asian languages are hardly visible.
Martin
May 2nd, 2006 3:18 am
Not many blogs in South Asian languages >> it’s nothing strange when their governments don’t allow them to search for basic english terms about people’s rights and laws… everything is still censored
Michael Rew
May 2nd, 2006 4:21 am
I think Japanese has overrun English because Japan is more tech-savvy than America, considering how much technology is invented, manufactured, improved, and used there. Japan may be leading the way in personal robotics, for example, and some Japanese tech inventions are…disturbing, for lack of a better term.
jonathan okanlawon
May 2nd, 2006 4:41 am
this japs have taken over the blogosphere.just visit http://www.technorati.com to see the extent of their impact.
brem
May 2nd, 2006 5:25 am
Nope. But I can translate it into french.
Dave Starr
May 2nd, 2006 5:53 am
Although anyone desiring to appeal to the entire Blogosphere might do well to post a little in Japanese, there’s no real need to.
Everyone in Japan who has completed High school (a very large percentage of the population, much higher than the US’s abysmal percentage, no idea about Australia’s) will have taken 10 to 12 years of formal English education. They can read and write English in most cases much better than they might speak it.
I worked in Tokyo for three years supervising a number of Japanese employees. I was continually embarrassed by technical questions about English my workers would ask me …obscure rules of grammar and such that I had no idea of.
Japan is a good potential market, especially for those with tech or gadget orientation.
As far as having a spate of visitors from Japan or Taiwan, etc., and wondering how to welcome them … just write a welcome post in English acknowledging or explaining the burst of traffic, and you’ll make new friends (and readers) … friendship and interest in people usually translates pretty well.
If you Want to Reach the World - Localize Your Theme - Webgazette.co.uk - Change is the only constant…
May 2nd, 2006 8:42 am
[…] I just read an interesting post over at Problogger about the most common language used by bloggers: […]
jhay
May 2nd, 2006 10:09 am
Translation services would be given a boost by this trend, that is if more non-Japanese users are interested in reading Japanese-written or other non-English blogs.
Dave Starr
May 3rd, 2006 4:50 am
An interesting tidbit … after making the post here yesterday about my thoughts on personal stragtegy for dealing with visitors whose language you don’t speak, I just noticed I had more blog visitors from Japan in about 12 hours than I normally get in a month. I guess the moral is a heck of a lot of people read Problogger from Japan … or never be afraid to comment? ;-)
The banker
May 3rd, 2006 6:24 am
I have a japanese friend who might be able to help you with the translation. She has lived in the U:S and she has done some translation work before. I don’t know how her schedule looks right now though. Just send me an email if you are still interested in the idea and I will ask her./Patrik
Jimmy
May 3rd, 2006 12:02 pm
Anyone want to translate ProBlogger into Japanese?
Nope. But i can translate into Malaysian Language :-) hehe
Jimmy, Malaysia
The banker
May 3rd, 2006 5:25 pm
I thought you could see everyone’s email adress if they left a comment on your blog. But if that is not the case mine is webmaster@morkpoker.net /Patrik
Mike
May 4th, 2006 8:29 am
These figures don’t surprise me at all. I have lived in Japan for about 9 years now and blogging is huge here. From a general observation, most people use free hosting services like livedoor and the community site mixi.
I tried to get into it, but have enough trouble updating my English blog. Other than the obvious language barrier, many things just don’t translate well culturally. What is interesting or funny to westerners, doesn’t raise an eyebrow in Japan. Japanese tv is also difficult to get the humour.
I don’t know the figures, but Japan has a huge number of printed publications available, the graphics and design are extremely high quality.
گزیر » روزی امروز
May 4th, 2006 6:27 pm
[…] وبلاگنویسان ژاپنی زبان از انگلیسی نویسها هم بیشتر مینویسند […]
ederic
May 12th, 2006 11:42 am
This is an interesting bit of info. Here in the Philippines, I think most bloggers blog in English. Among the early bloggers like me, only a few use the native language Filipino (or Tagalog).
Remote Support Software
May 12th, 2006 1:58 pm
The Japaneese blogging community is so much on the rise because Japan is very succesful economically. One of the key factors in economic success is communication. This is an innert factor to economic prosperity. With thought or concious, this has migrated into the culture of the citizens and spills into the blogging as another outlet for communications.
Thank you,
Roger.
PC Remote Control Over the Web.
Remote Support Software
May 12th, 2006 2:00 pm
The Japaneese blogging community is so much on the rise because Japan is very succesful economically. One of the key factors in economic success is communication. This is an innert factor to economic prosperity. With thought or concious, this has migrated into the culture of the citizens and spills into the blogging as another outlet for communications.
Thank you,
Roger.
Remote Desktop Control Over the Web
Viva La Blog
May 21st, 2006 9:19 am
Not many blogs in South Asian languages
Post featured from SouthAsiaBiz:When I read the entry ‘Non English Posts make up over Two Thirds of Total Blog Posting’
at ProBlogger of Darren Rowse, the first thing that came to my mind is
that why there were not many blogs in South Asian languag…
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blogHelper » Number of Japanese Blogs Has Tripled
July 5th, 2006 11:54 pm
[…] This probably won’t mean anything to most bloggers, but it’s always useful to remind ourselves that English isn’t the main blogging language, and hasn’t been for many months now. Like Darren Rowse asked in May, does anyone want to translate this blog into Japanese? […]
led display
June 5th, 2008 1:48 pm
How can inproof this statistic is noerror?
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