English, Chinese, and Hindi?

According to Silicon India Google CE Eric Schmidt says India will become the world’s biggest Internet market in 5 to 10 years. Says the article, “Schmidt’s other futurist view is that Hindi, not Hispanic, could become one of the world’s three Internet languages, in conjunction with English and Chinese.”

Given that Hindi was represented on just a handful of the 300 global Web sites we reviewed for the 2006 Web Globalization Report Card, that’s a pretty bold statement. Statistically, it makes sense. But the Global 1000 have yet to embrace Hindi on the Web in a big way.

Chinese (Simplified) is a different story. It is now the ranked 5th on our list of most-popular languages, up from 7th last year.

Here are the top five (after English):

1. German
2. French
3. Japanese
4. Spanish
5. Chinese

(Visited 39 times, 1 visits today)