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Which language is the fastest growing on the internet?

If you said English, you are wrong. It is not Chinese either. It is Arabic. No wonder they had the Arab Spring. Arabic has grown by a whopping 5 296.6 percent from 2.5 million users in 2000 to 135.6 million last year. Russian is in second place. It grew by 2 721.8 percent from 3.1 million to 87.5 million users. Chinese is number three. It now has 649.4 million users up from 32.3 million, an increase of 1910.3 percent. Chinese is now the second most widely used language on the internet after English. English has 800.6 million users, a 468.8 percent increase from 2000 when it had 140.8 million users. There are now 2.8 billion internet users across the world, up from 361 million in 2000. Zimbabwe has 5.2 million internet users, most of them using their mobile phones, but with some people having three or more phones, there could be a lot of double counting.

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Charles Rukuni

The Insider is a political and business bulletin about Zimbabwe, edited by Charles Rukuni. Founded in 1990, it was a printed 12-page subscription only newsletter until 2003 when Zimbabwe's hyper-inflation made it impossible to continue printing.

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