on 23/4/02 4:24 pm, The Fool at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> From: Russell Chapman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >> William T Goodall wrote: >> >>> Now consider that Korea (AFAIK) has the highest penetration of > broadband >>> internet in the world, that Chinese ideographs are the most common > written >>> language etc and it seems likely that in a few years most spam (and > most of >>> the www for that matter) will be in ideographs rather than English. >>> >> I think that's personal/domestic penetration. US companies still pour > an >> awful lot of stuff onto the net through some fairly big pipes. And I >> think that those same high bandwidth users in Korea have a fairly high >> proportion of English speakers among them. >> >> Regardless, I think English will remain the >> dominant language on the net for a while yet. > > If only because keyboards are great for the 60 some characters used by > latin based languages, instead of the 6000 - 12000 required in some > oriental languages. Besides English is the lingua franca. >
See http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176049.html The story gives these figures for the current top 5 countries for numbers of users with home internet access: 1 USA 166 million 2 China 56.6 million 3 Japan 51.3 million 4 Germany 32.2 million 5 UK 29 million And predicts the Chinese figure could be 257 million in three or four years. -- William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
