Russian is second most common language used on websites

Russian has eclipsed German as the second most common language used on websites, according to a new survey by W3tech, a provider of information about web technologies. Just under 6% of all websites use Russian, a distant second to English (54.7%). In addition to Russia, Russian is the primary languages for websites in countries of the former Soviet Union such as Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

The Russian internet domain .ru is also the most popular country-specific domain, used on 4.4% of all websites. In second place is Germany’s .de (3.4%) followed by the UK’s .uk (1.9%). Over half of websites use the global domain .com. Despite these figures, users from China and English-language speaking countries dominate the web, accounting for just over half of all of those online. By contrast, Russians language speakers comprise only 3% of the world’s internet users.