Top 16 Languages in Second Life

In the May Key Metrics, Nobody Fugazi, posted this comment...

"I think it might be worthwhile adding the national language next to each country. This would provide an indicator of native languages which could be a very useful metric."

Also, there is a request for this feature in JIRA:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-201

I also believe this to be of interest and a vital data metric to any project you intend for an international audience in Second Life. Unfortunately, this data type is not easily generated.

Linden Labs has trouble producing reports on information they have access to, in a consistent and accurate fashion. They do not fully respond to, or take critical comment well, in regard to this subject. So to expect them, to extend out to a broader scope of data, may be more than you should expect of them. If they took the metrics seriously they would not be in a blog, they would be on their website and formatted correctly. My larger comment about this issue...
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/06/12/may-2007-key-metrics-published/#comment-349034

I recently wrote an academic article and I am currently building a project for a Swiss client and had to generate this data. Below are the results of this research, from January through May 2007.

One of the important responsibilities in generating data is explaining methodology and reporting your sources. That way, even if you disagree with the outcome you know how it took place So here goes...

The 2 originating sources that I correlated together are the 5 Key Metric reports from the LInden Labs, 01-2007 to 05-2007, from the sheet entitled, Active by Country. The other source is from the CIA's World FactBook. Highly detailed and up to date. Don't care for their politically motivated opinions about country politics, history and forms of government but their facts are spot on.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

I built a Filemaker Pro relational database for the analysis. Five tables, one for each month, for the Linden metrics on countries and their percentage shares of the Second Life population. This took a bit of massaging, Linden Labs does not consistently report this in the same format: countries fall out of list, decimals are rounded to the point of flattening and their are countries miss spelled or in disagreement with what the CIA thinks is a country.

The CIA Factbook does not put the language in one downloadable file like they do with their country population data: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html

With 238 countries, it took 2 days to enter the data into the table I created for that purpose. That table held the country name, population, predominate (or official) language and secondary language, global region and sub region.

The corelation took place using the country name as the match field, that bound (or related) the data from the Linden metrics and the country metrics supplied by the Factbook. A scripted search pulled together the percentages of the 103 languages and ranked them with a descending sort.

Now for the other shoe to drop...

As we all know, some countries have more than one predominate or official language.
Some examples of error:
Switzerland: German 63.7%, French 20.4%, Italian 6.5% the method only captures he German.
Belgium: Dutch 60%, French 40%, German less than 1% the method only captures he Dutch.
Antarctica: that's right, hard to believe its in SL, I went with the international science language of English.
Afghanistan: I doubt many Afgahnis' are in SL other than ex pats, went with their national language, Dari.

All in all, the outcome is what you would call mostly accurate, the level of error more in the small decimals. Regardless, later I am going to redesign the language fields to show the individual languages and reenter the data for a finer comb of percentages.

Some observations of merit:
• English is in gradual decline as the overall largest share.
• French was the long term, second most spoken, but was surpassed by German in March.
• Spain is a small percentage of the SL population but is spoken by many countries with small shares, it adds up.
• Italian was losing ground but then sprang back,
• Portuguese is the fastest growing language in SL, thanks to Brazil.
• Despite an apparent percentage decline, Dutch has an a very large share considering its small real world population. This is born out by another study I have completed.
• Although slow, Japanese and Chinese are gaining ground steadily.
• The Greeks and the Turkish clearly enjoy nicer weather, rather than sitting at a computer.
• Small but with successful high tech sectors and long, dark winters, Scandinavia holds its own.
• My hats off to the countries with isolated languages, Poland, Romania and Finland.
• Although it did not make the list, Arabic is up and coming.

If anyone in the following comments is curious about a language not listed, this post is already long, I will happily query the database and post your request.

All said and done here all the results ranked from highest to lowest based on the May metrics.

......................01.2007.......02.2007.......03.2007.........04.2007.........05.2007
English.........41.4076........41.4009.......36.6417.........39.3690........34.2361
German........12.3090........12.3070.......15.9992.........12.2400........13.5780
French..........16.1316........16.1290.......11.0172.........10.5990........10.3168
Spanish..........5.4685..........5.4677..........4.6225..........5.0370..........7.6415
Italian............1.9333..........1.9330..........3.9874..........4.9700..........4.8617
Portuguese.....4.1611..........4.1605..........5.2170..........6.6700..........6.3693
Japanese.........1.2881..........1.2879..........2.4293..........3.3790..........3.6976
Dutch.............9.1855..........9.1841..........7.6019..........5.5500..........4.6195
Swedish.........0.9496..........0.9494..........0.8626..........1.0200..........1.0214
Danish...........0.8822..........0.8821..........2.6109..........1.1300..........0.9101
Chinese..........1.0577..........1.0575..........1.2314..........1.8390..........1.2571
Polish............0.3596...........0.3595..........1.2086..........0.6400..........0.6333
Romanian......0.1983..........0.1982..........0.3237..........0.3200..........0.4712
Greek.............0.5918..........0.5917..........0.3473..........0.3890..........0.3412
Finnish...........0.1861..........0.1861..........0.2352..........0.2500..........0.3149
Turkish...........0.5075..........0.5074..........0.4679..........0.4300..........0.2977

Sorry for the formatting, no HTML. Talk to the LIndens about that.

Interesting premise... if I understand correctly, you matched languages with the information in the CIA handbook? In other words - your Finnish percentage is the number of SL residents from Finland, rather than the number of those that also speak another language (German/Russian/English).

Yes Viridian, that is correct, as the examples show. This method is not as surgical as I would like. Even if I were to go back and make the refinements I talked about above, it would only be slightly more accurate.

The only exact way would be...

1. To measure the use of a specific language interface.
2. Run a successful, well addressed survey.
3. Some other mechanism within the technical bowels of SL.

As they say, "Close enough in horse shoes and nuclear war."

More language trivia tidbits:

Number of countries listed for a specific, official or predominate language.

Language # of Countrries
English................47
German................4
French................26
Spanish..............22
Italian..................3
Portuguese..........6
Japanese..............1
Dutch..................3
Swedish..............1
Danish................1
Chinese...............5
Polish..................1
Romanian............2
Greek..................2
Finnish................1
Turkish................1

In my own nearly two years in SL, aside from English, I have mostly encountered people who speak Japanese or French as their native language. Japanese people are mayhaps more likely to approach me, as I have a Japanese surname in SL. I have also encountered those who speak German, and a few who speak Chinese. Not many other languages that I can recall, though I think I heard Portugese and Spanish a few times.

My own native language is English (I'm American). But I also speak a little French (used to live near the Canadian border), Japanese (interested in the culture, and lived on the West coast of the USA), German (ancestral heritage), Spanish (useful to know in South and Central Texas), and just a wee bit of Scotts Gaelic (ancestry, again).

I have a "Babbler" HUD that allows me to chat with people in other languages. It's been particularly useful of late with a few people whom I have met, who spoke only French or Japanese. Not a perfect translation, but it's a decent start in gaining understanding.

I envy you Ceera, I never run into, as far as I know, any Japanese or Chinese, my loss. I live in Seattle on the west coast of the US, so here I am surrounded by a majority of Asian cultures. Besides the aforementioned, also, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Philippine, Samoan and Laotian Hmong.

We have a lot of far eastern Russians here but our fastest growing minority is from the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, as well as, a lot of Sudanese.

In Second LIfe I am most in the contact with the Dutch and French speaking communities, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Switzerland. I know quite a few from Portugal and a growing contingent of Brazilians. But in general I meeting a lot more people from South America.

On my island, my tenants are Swedish, Belgian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, American, without Babbler we would be lost, all bow before Max Case!

I was in BareRose a couple of nights ago, and I saw (for the first time) an Asian language being spoken -- in native characters, not translated into Western characters. I didn't even know the client could do that. I don't have enough of an eye for Asian languages to say which one was being spoken.

Unlike Ceera, I see lots of Spanish and Portuguese. But I speak Spanish, and spend some time in Spanish-speaking areas of SL, so I suppose that's no surprise. I have also run into (in decreasing order of frequency) German, French, Italian, and Dutch. All of those languages have enclaves -- clubs, bars, malls, even entire islands -- where they are the primary language used. Visiting the malls in non-English areas is fun; you'll see marchandise from sellers that aren't the usual mall suspects, and there aren't any foreign currency exchange problems like in RL.

I retrieved the languages spoken in Second Life from the user profile and created the pie chart of the top 10 languages.

To see the chart visit http://www.metaverse-business.com/avatarlanguage.php