i just googled: percentage of internet

[jojojojoanne]

written in english and one site came up with the statistic of 80% +,why does one language take prescedence over all others?

[123everton]

The British Empire

[hc4361]

Hurray for Hollywood. Well, partly the movie industry, the British Empire, America, Australia, Canada....
In most languages today, including Welsh, a television is television, same with telephone, video, dvd, computer and related words. New words aren't translated into other languages, rather they are adopted in to the world's languages.
I don't know if it is admirable or deplorable that many people in seemingly remote parts of the world can speak an understandable form of English, often with an American twang.
The Japanese, for example, love 60s rock and roll music and happily sing away to the tunes, in English.

[beso]

Many languages have contributed words to English giving a very rich vocabulary. Often spoiled for choice of words and phrases all meaning much the same thing, the writer can make the text more interesting to read and convey more emotional content.

Languages that have been a bit precious about their purity haven't developed the same extent. It also provides a little familiarity to speakers of many other languages.

English has a very simple grammar without verbs being varied over six cases and thirteen tenses as in the Latin languages. Inanimate objects don't have pointless properties like gender.

The tone paterns in the voice don't radically change the meaning of words. This makes it easier to learn and saves the tonal variation to indicate emotional content allowing English speech to convery far more than languages such as Chinese.

The spelling is a nightmare but that doesn't matter for speaking while a dictionary can solve the problem when writing.

Basically English is the best language.

[jake-the-peg]

I'd be interested to know what other languages Beso is fluent in - he must be fluent in many to be in a position to say that English is the best! ;c)

Serious answer:

English is unique in being the only language which is spoken by more people as a second language than as a first.

If you add up all the English, Americans, Australians, Canadians etc. it still doesn't come to the number of Indians, Chinese etc. who speak English as a second language.

So although it may not have quite the number of speakers as say some Chinese languages it is the most widely spoken.

So if you're trying to communicate with the most people around the world English is your best bet.

Probably followed by Spanish