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The top 10 languages on the internet | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6061 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 9 of 18 11 July 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | ||
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As far as the Portuguese language goes, that does not surprise me.
In Portugal, people are generally crazy about what's new, namely technology. In this country, there are over 16 million mobile phones, of which 80% in normal use. Not bad, for a population of some 10-11 million people. Most of the people I know (and I'm not that young anymore) are constantly using social networking websites, and many of them have their own blogs. Many public services are provided online (and some exclusively). As for Brazil: whenever I search for something in the net using the Portuguese language, I get a lot of (relevant) results from Brazilian websites; and you can actually see that they were developed independently from each other. Furthermore, some twenty years ago I worked in a team where there was a Brazilian, and he told me that a lot of services over there were already computer-based (like driver's licences and stuff like that); and that was twenty years ago. I'm aware that I'm giving here a view more qualitative than quantitative. Please see this post as an illustration of some of the figures given above on this thread. Edited by Luso on 11 July 2012 at 4:18am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 10 of 18 11 July 2012 at 10:17am | IP Logged | ||
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While I've come across a lot of Portuguese on the web, I'm not sure if it's ahead of French. Searching the phrase "I have" in Google gives the following,
Portuguese: Tenho - 271,000,000 hits Spanish: Tengo - 856,000,000 hits French: J'ai - 769,000,000 hits This is a very crude methodology, but I've tried a few other phrases, and French seems to have more hits than Portuguese. Computer French: Ordinateur - 174,000,000 Portuguese: Computador- 148,000,000 The word in Spanish appears to be partitioned between the two main variants. Spanish (AL) Computadora - 124,000,000 Spanish (ESP) Ordenador - 138,000,000 [EDIT - Corrected typo with tenho. Thanks Serpent] Edited by DaraghM on 11 July 2012 at 3:58pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 11 of 18 11 July 2012 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I've no knowledge of Portuguese, but I believe tenho doesn't act as the auxiliary for the past, does it? In French, j'ai would express both posession and a lot of past tenses.
I'd rather follow your method than the one proposed in the OP's link however, at least it says something about language usage, rather than reading ability. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 12 of 18 11 July 2012 at 11:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I would say that Brazil is quite rich a country, not as rich as France and Belgium, but certainly richer than French Africa.
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| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 13 of 18 11 July 2012 at 11:47am | IP Logged | ||
The verb ter in Portuguese acts as the standard auxiliary for the past, but it's equivalent tener is rarely used in Spanish. In Spanish, tener + past participle is used to convey a sense of reiteration or insistence, but the standard auxiliary in Spanish is haber. However, I've just realised a bigger weakness with my comparison is that number of tenses in the French past is less than Portuguese or Spanish. The French preterite became the literary tense the past historic. Edited by DaraghM on 11 July 2012 at 12:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4868 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 14 of 18 11 July 2012 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
I guess that visibility depends on whether you use the same standard websites as the majority of users that speak Mandarin, Portuguese, etc. Besides facebook the place where I see the most foreign languages (if I don't actively search for them) is youtube. I've sometimes seen Chinese comments on music videos, etc. even though the vast majority of speakers doesn't have access to youtube. I think it would be interesting to know which language has the most blogs, which country has the most active internet users over 50, in which countries English is commonly used for internet communication, that kind of thing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 18 11 July 2012 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's tenho not tehno:)
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| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 16 of 18 11 July 2012 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks. Just corrected the post. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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