The Russian language took second place in popularity on the Internet, although it is only slightly ahead of German. According to a survey by the agency W3Techs, Russian appears on 5.9% of all pages that can be found on the Internet. The English language remains in first place by a large margin, in which 54.7% of online texts are written.
In third place, just behind Russian, is German (5.9%). Fourth place belongs to Spanish (4.7%), French is in fifth place (4.5%). It is followed by Chinese (4.4%), Japanese (4.2%), Portuguese (2.3%), Polish (1.8%), Italian (1.5%), Turkish (1.4%) and Arabic (1.2%).
Russian is still the dominant language in some countries of the former USSR. Predominant for domains in areas associated with Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. In September 2011, the .ru domain reached the most popular national top-level and the 3rd place worldwide. According to calculations, this domain appeared in 4.4% of websites. The first place is occupied by the .com domain (53.1%), followed by the .net domain (5.9%). There has also been growth for the domain in the .su zone, which was created in 1990 for the Soviet Union.
At the same time, it should be noted that the Russian language is much less used on popular websites. If we consider only the thousand most visited sources on the Internet, then Russian is only in 6th place, followed by English, Chinese, French, German and Japanese.
According to analysts’ estimates, however, Russian will retain the second place on the Internet for at least several years. Chinese may overtake it in the future, however, its growth has not yet been recorded according to statistics.
Source: news.yandex.ru
