Weekly Viz 2023-06-19

The Most Used Language On The Internet

This week, I saw a visualization of languages used on the Internet vs. spoken as the primary language on chartr newsletter (one data visualization newsletter I really like). The original data comes from rest of world. I think it’s a very interesting data to show how imbalanced internet resource is to people around the world.

My Visualization

I rarely use treemap visualization because it is not very intuitive to compare the size of small rectangles (for the similar reason, I don’t like pie charts). However, given this dataset looks at the same set of 10 languages by two different dimensions, I feel it might be a good candidate to put two treemaps side by side for comparison.

Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

Dashboard link

Insights

• Though English is only the native language for less than 5% of the total population, it dominates the internet and is used on more than half of the publicly acceesible domains;
• Some other languages that show higher popularity on the internet than the actual % spoken as the primary languages are Russian, German, French, and Japanese;
• Nowadays, as LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard use the data scraped from the internet to train the models, this imbalance might even introduce bias into the new AI technologies.

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