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and to the left; or the vacancy of local language is filled with multiple foreign
languages, in which case the LDI grows and the point moves up and to the left.
Comparison by Region: Asia, Africa, Europe
Based on data collected in November 2009, the LDI and local language ratio
were calculated for all country domains in Asia and Africa. As we do not
have data for European countries, we used Google’s page count by language.
Figures 4, 5 and 6 show the Local Language Ratio – LDI chart for these three
regions.
Asian LDIs are plotted in Figure 4. China, Japan and Korea and some Arabicspeaking
countries (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan) are found in the bottomright
corner, while Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia, Israel, Turkey, Georgia
and Mongolia show a relatively high local language presence.
Of note here is the context of central Asian countries. Their Web spaces
are composed of local languages, with major components of English and
Russian, although the emphasis changes by country. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have a major emphasis on Russian, while only
Turkmenistan has an emphasis on English.
On the other hand, web contents in the Indian subcontinent have a nearly
negligible local language presence on the Web. More than 70 % of these Web
contents are written in English.
Worth mentioning here is the case of Laos. According to Ethnologue, the
country’s LDI is only 0.674. Why then does it have such a high LDI on the
Web The major reason for this is that the “.la” domain is actively marketed
to foreigners, including customers connected to Los Angeles. As the domain
is sold mainly to foreign industries and peoples, only 8% of web pages of “.la”
domain are written in Lao.
LDIs of African domains are plotted in Figure 5. The presence of local
languages in African domains is far rarer than in Asian domains. The local
language claims the majority only in Sudan and Libya. However, several
countries show high Web LDIs.
The LDIs of European and some Anglophone country domains are plotted in
Figure 6. Local language presence is above 50% with the exception of Slovenia
and Denmark (those countries’ web spaces are dominated by English), which
results in a lower LDI. At the opposite extreme is the United Kingdom,
which joins other Anglophone countries (USA, Australia and New Zealand)
in displaying a characteristically low LDI.
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