Languages of the World (Wide Web)

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/07/languages-of-world-wide-web.html

by mark_h • 15 years ago

7 3 15 years ago

googleresearch.blogspot.com

reirob• 15 years ago

Very very interesting. Especially for people speaking several languages.

Here some of my personal interpretation on the graphs - I am speaking German, French, Russian:

* German:

The many links to German sites I would tend to explain (a) by geographical neighbourhood (France, Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Czech/Slovak, Italy, Slovenia with Austria); (b) by national minorities present in Germany for different historical reasons (Italian, Turkish, Polish, Greek (immigrants helped to reconstruct Germany after 2nd WW); ex Yugoslavian (refuges during Yugoslavian wars )); ex-German colonies/settlements like Hungary, part of Poland

Very interesting for me that the only link that in 2 directions is with France! For me it shows that Germans like very much French and are willing to learn it. I do not know if the feelings are the same for the opposite (French learning German), but I can see that there are more and more French people starting to learn German - and knowing the linguistic introversion of French this really a sign of change to more openness.

Very surprising to see Mongolian sites to link to German sites? Why is this? Any explanation?

* Armenian/Georgian:

1) How comes that there strong bidirectional links between Armenian/Georgian and Belarus? I was not at all aware that many Armenians/Georgians are living in Belarus? And the languages are really different! Could somebody enlighten me?

2) I am very surprised that there is no link between Armenian and French?! This is very strange, because in France there is a very strong Armenian population and historically France was the first country to provide asylum to Armenians. Does it mean that the Armenian community in France is isolating from their roots?

3) Finally it is funny to see how their is no link between Turkish and Armenian at all. Not really surprising knowing the history, but still sad.

* Russian:

Did you see that from Russian there are no relevant links to other languages? And all the links to Russian are from former Soviet Union republics where Russian was mandatory in school. I bet this will change in mid or long term future! I strongly believe that many West European countries will make an effort to learn Russian and I hope that Russian government will make some of efforts in this direction. Sure this is biased because I love the Russian language and literature.

* Turkish:

Very surprised how isolated Turkish is. The only link being Azerbaijani which is a very similar language. I expected to see many more links to Turkish from other Ex-Soviet countries with close linguistic relationship (Turkmen, Kazhakh, Uzbekh, ...)

When looking to the graph that shows the relationship with English it is surprising that there is a strong link from Turkish to English, but nothing in reverse direction. How comes? Does it mean that there is no much of Turkish content that would be interesting for English audience (with Turskish roots)? Look how it is the same with the relationship between Turkish and German.

* Spanish:

Not very surprising that there are only links TO Spanish and no links FROM Spanish.

bane2• 15 years ago

Your observations on the Russian and Turkish subgraphs I think are spot on. There are a few other anomalies that I find interesting as well.

I'd love to see a 2011 version of this same graph.

bane2• 15 years ago

The graphs are also apparently minus Korean.

Languages of the World (Wide Web)

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