The Web (Barely) Speaks Arabic

Arabic ranks in the top five of languages spoken in the world, along with Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and English. Though statistics vary a bit, the reliable ones I’ve encountered suggest that about 220 million people are native speakers of Arabic, while some 330 million people are native English speakers. Now let’s take these numbers and do some quick math: 220 million of 330 million is roughly a 2 to 3 ratio of native Arabic to English speakers on the planet.

 

How does that number work on the web? Does the 2 to 3 formula translate into some type of proportional representation of online content in Arabic and English? Not surprisingly, the answer is “no,” and it's not even close. English dominates the web with a share of some 60% of content. The next nine languages combined total about 34%, with Arabic in tenth at under 2%. Part of the answer is revealed by looking at numbers of people actually online instead of total native speakers. According to Internetworldstats.com, 537 million internet users primarily speak English and 65 million speak Arabic (note that they’re including non-native speakers in their numbers of 'primary' rather than native speakers). At first glance the near 2 percent figure for Arabic content online doesn’t seem so bad given that Arabic speakers represent about 3 percent of the online audience. But given that the web increasingly dominates our consumption of content and our conversations with others, it’s an understandable concern that less multilingual content online could lead to further erosion of languages in offline spaces.

 

There are a number of reasons why English has become the world’s convener language. I’m less interested in exploring that at the moment and more interested in discussing a number of current efforts to localize the web and make it more multilingual. One such effort I came across recently is in Doha, at the Qatar Science & Technology Park, where a number of publications are being converted into a digital format from either the original Arabic, or after being translated from other languages. These digitization projects are a way of adding Arabic content to the web, and creating more high-value content that can be explored by users in their own language. Its part of the movement to make sure that the web’s content more closely mirrors the experience of speakers in the physical world, where the local language rightly has precedence.

 

 

 

Similar efforts are being encouraged by political and technology leaders in the Gulf and throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Among the major technology players in the movement are Google and Yahoo, targeting efforts from encouraging translation of Wikipedia pages, to the creation of original content, to localized versions of news and other pages. Yahoo's Maktoob is now the second largest news site in the region after Al Jazeera. An example from the commercial sector is Dubizzle.com, based in Dubai, which originally only ran its online classifieds in English but has now expanded to include several localized Arabic versions.

 

Looking ahead, the continued surge of mobile devices and the youth population wave in the region are two factors that could signal a significant increase in the amount of user-generated Arabic language content within the next five years. As noted in Meed.com, “…with mobile phone use extending the web’s reach further and faster into the region, it is likely Arabic-speaking users will hit the 100 million mark in the near future, bringing a groundswell of Arabic content with them.”

 

Content providers react to audience needs, so when that surge of users emerges as anticipated, there’s hope that other high quality original or translated content, in addition to a variety of social and user-generated content, will follow.