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Home > Blog > Multilingual > Most Used Languages on the Internet (Which to Add to Your Site?)

Most Used Languages on the Internet (Which to Add to Your Site?)

Knowing the most used languages on the Internet and most commonly spoken languages in the world is important information when deciding what to translate your website into. It can give you pointers about which languages it makes sense to adopt and which not.

After all, there are many benefits to making your site multilingual. It can lead to more traffic, increased sales, better conversions, and higher consumer trust. However, which languages should you convert your website into to achieve that? What languages would allow you to effectively reach the most people?

To help answer these questions, in this post, we will examine the top spoken languages in the world and on the Internet (as you will see, these are not always the same). You’ll learn what languages have the most native speakers and how that reflects on their use in online content.

However, choosing a language for your website translation depends on more than just raw numbers. For that reason, we will also discuss factors you should additionally consider when adding new languages to your site. Finally, we’ll recommend a way to implement the localization of your website in the easiest way.

What Are the Most Spoken Languages in the World and Online?

To start off, let’s examine what languages have the most native speakers in the world. After that, we will examine how that relates to the most used languages on the Internet.

The Top 10 Spoken Languages in the World

Here are the most commonly spoken languages in the world. The list below is based on information from Wikipedia , which pulled its data from Ethnologue .

• Globally, Mandarin Chinese is the most used language with 939 million native speakers . Not a big surprise seeing as China is the second most populous country in the world and Mandarin its official language.
• In second place comes Spanish , with 485 million. This, too, is not surprising. There is a multitude of countries that claim it as their native tongue, especially in South America.
• English goes for third place. That’s especially thanks to the USA, which provide more than 300 of the 380 million native speakers .
• In fourth place is Hindi , one of the most spoken languages in India ( 345 million people speak it ). India is actually the country with the most inhabitants, however, because it’s broken down into several different languages, none of them claim the top spot.
• Portuguese is the fifth most spoken language in the world. Here, too, we have South America to thank. Brazil provides some 200 of the overall 236 million native Portuguese speakers .
• On rank six is another language from the Indian subcontinent, Bengali . 234 million people speak it, mostly in Bangladesh, where it’s the main language, and the Eastern part of India.
• Number seven is Russian , which has 147 million speakers . As the biggest country in the world and a corresponding population, it’s natural that it breaks into the top ten.
• Our number eight is Japanese with 123 million native speakers . Though relatively small, Japan is a densely inhabited country, which is why it places high up in the world’s most spoken languages.
• Yue Chinese including Cantonese comes ninth. It’s a group of Chinese dialects mostly spoken in the South of China. However, mind you, there are still 86.1 million people claiming it as their native tongue.
• Finally, at number ten is Vietnamese with 85 million speakers . Fun fact, Vietnamese is also spoken in a small region of Southern China.

Places 11-20

Who are the runner-ups? Let’s go over them real quick:

• Turkish ( 84 million speaker s)
• Wu Chinese (e.g. Shanghainese, 83.4 million )
• Marathi (spoken mostly in the Maharashtra region of India, 83.2 million )
• Telugu ( 83 million speakers , another Indian language native to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana)
• Korean ( 81.7 million speakers )
• French ( 80.8 million )
• Tamil (spoken in the Indian state Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and others by 78.6 million people )
• Egyptian Arabic ( 77.4 million )
• Standard German (there are 75.3 million of us)
• Urdu ( 70.6 million speakers , mostly in Pakistan and India)

Contrast That With the Most Dominant Languages in Online Content

So, from the above it seems like if you want to reach the biggest possible audience, you simply translate your site to Chinese , English, and Spanish, right? Job done.

However, it’s not as simple as that.

For one because, as we will see below, there are some languages that we haven’t even covered yet. In addition, just because a lot of people speak a particular language, that doesn’t mean it makes sense to offer it on your website. Finally, the language distribution on the Internet is not the same as in the real world. In fact, it’s very different. Check out the share of languages in online content according to W3Techs below.

As you can see, English is absolutely dominating with almost 54% of all online content. In comparison, in worldwide languages, its share is really only about 5%. Next up are Spanish and Russian with only about 5% each. In the real world, they make up 6% and 2% of the world’s most spoken languages respectively.

German, which didn’t even crack the top ten earlier can be found in fourth place. In addition, Germany’s country-specific domain ending is the fifth most common in the world .

On the other hand, Chinese, which, as we remember, is the language with the most native speakers, is only on rank 13 with a 1.4 % share of online content.

Curious, isn’t it?

Most Commonly Used Languages on Popular Websites

Yet, the trend towards English as the dominant language for online content continues when you look at individual popular websites. A good example of that is YouTube, or the “second most popular search engine in the world”. An analysis of the 250 most popular YouTube channels showed that 66% are in English, 15% in Spanish, 7% in Portuguese, 5% in Hindi, and 2% in Korean.

It’s not clear from when these numbers are and YouTube doesn’t publish official numbers for this but it’s an interesting snapshot. Plus, Alan Spicer comes to similar conclusions.

Another example is Wikipedia. They have a breakdown of daily traffic for the different language versions of their site.

Here, too, English is the front runner, interestingly followed by Japanese, then Spanish, then German. As you can see, language preference also changes according to content type, however, English is always in the lead.

So, Does Everyone on the Web Simply Speak English?

If you are perplexed about the difference in language distribution online and in real life, we’ll get into the reasons for it further below. However, one decisive factor is also where you get your data from.

For example, the information from W3Techs above is based on the top 10 million websites worldwide, which likely skew heavily towards English. Things look a bit different if you take the numbers from InternetWorldStats , which estimate total global Internet users by language in 2020.

Here, too, English reigns supreme. Yet, it is much more closely followed by Chinese, then Spanish, and Arabic, which we hadn’t even discussed yet. Besides that, it’s surprising to see Indonesian/Malaysian in the mix as well as French and German in the top ten Internet languages.

The reason why Arabic didn’t appear earlier is that it consists of many dialects, which can be very different from one another. That’s why other sources don’t count it as one language. At the same time, written Arabic does not vary in the same way. Therefore, in (written) online content, you can count it as one.

You will also notice that the English-speaking world population is given as more than 1.5 billion even though we just learned that there are only around 380 million native speakers. It seems that there are a lot of other people who use English as their primary online language.

Finally, what’s interesting to note is that different languages still have different amounts of people to add to the pool of Internet users. For example, while Japanese speakers are at almost 100% Internet penetration, their Chinese counterparts still have literally hundreds of millions of people to add to their ranks.

That means, in the long run, Chinese could actually be the dominant language of the web, at least by the number of speakers. To catch up in terms of available content, it still has a ways to go. We have to keep in mind though that these numbers are three years old, so things are probably a bit different now.

What Does This All Mean for Your Website?

The question is, what do we learn from the above? First of all, English is clearly the dominant language of the Internet. That’s not a big surprise since it’s what the web was originally built on and, therefore, has had a head start. Plus, it’s the world’s universal language. There are loads of non-English native speakers who are nevertheless consuming and producing content in that language (such as me).

That also means that, if your website is currently in another language, English is a good choice for you to translate it into. Doing so will give you the most bang for your buck. It allows you to target a large and diverse audience, not just native speakers.

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Another main takeaway is that real-world popularity does not translate to the online audience. German is a globally relatively small language but has a comparatively large presence online. This is something to be aware of when deciding what to translate your website into.

One of the main reasons for that is likely Internet access, which differs between language groups. This can be both due to simply a lack of technical infrastructure or because there are other obstacles in place. For example, YouTube is blocked in China. Therefore, you will have a hard time finding channels from the mainland on the platform. Depending on what your website is about, this could be relevant.

Finally, there are still a number of emerging language markets. Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, and French will all be adding users to the Internet in the coming years. This means, if you are an early adopter, it can give you an edge business. You may be able to establish yourself before others jump on the same language trend and also possibly break into a less saturated market.

How to Pick Which Languages to Translate Your Website Into

That leaves the question, should you simply choose languages to add to your website due to the sheer number of people who speak them? Of course not. The decision tree for that is more complex. Let’s discuss other important factors to consider.

Clarify Your Target Group

The first step when considering making changes to your website is always to go back to your target group. Who exactly are you trying to attract and talk to with your site? In the end, it doesn’t matter if the languages you offer are the most used on the Internet if your target audience doesn’t speak them.

For example, when doing business in Iceland, your visitors couldn’t care less if your website is in Chinese, even if it’s statistically the most spoken language in the world. On the other hand, as a hospitality business near any tourist hotspot in Europe, Mandarin can be a good choice since the Chinese are world champions in traveling .

On the other hand, if you are a local coffee shop operating in a city that has a lot of expats (like Berlin), adding English to your website can be a good idea to attract more customers.

Simply put, just like your website content, you need to align your website translation with your intended target group. It depends on more than simply the number of speakers you can reach. If you add a language to your site, you should have a good reason for it.

Examine the Markets You Are Operating In

In addition to your target group, the market that your business operates in can already provide some guidelines for the choice of language on your site.

If you offer your services globally, going for the most spoken languages in the world in descending order can actually be a way to go. This allows you to cover the most ground and bring in additional traffic. On the other hand, if your market is strictly local, this approach doesn’t make sense.

What’s more, the location of your business can actually dictate your website languages. There are several countries in the world where you need to offer more than one language out of the box. For example, in Spain, besides Spanish, you would be well advised to also provide your website in Catalan, Galician, and/or Basque.

A website operating in Switzerland needs three languages: French, Italian, and German.

However, it’s not just something for when your locality forces more than one language upon you. It can also be a conscious decision in order to start exploring and serving new buyers.

Translating your site into the languages of neighboring countries can be a good way to attract business from there. First of all, doing so will allow your site to show up for relevant search queries in those languages. Secondly, it’s a big factor in purchase decisions. For many people, the ability to get information in their mother tongue is an important trust factor.

Check Your Analytics and Traffic

Another consideration for translating your website is visitor language. A language might be one of the most used in the world or even on the Internet, but is it what your audience speaks?

To answer that question, you’d do well to turn to your website analytics. In Google Analytics and other such solutions, you can see a map of where your visitors are from and also the language settings of their browsers.

This can greatly help you make decisions about what language it makes sense to offer on your site. If you don’t offer their language currently but people from that country still visit your site, just imagine how many would come if you communicated in their mother tongue.

Other sources for this kind of information can be keywords in webmaster tools, support inquiries, or messages on social media.

Do a Competitor Analysis

Another way to get ideas about which of the world’s most spoken languages is probably a good idea to have on your site is to look at your competition. Check the web presence of your closest competitors and see what languages they include. Oftentimes, they are there for a good reason. Your competitors might know something you don’t.

Sure, you still need to make your own decisions, however, checking on others can give you an inkling about what languages could help you get more visitors, sales, and conversions. It allows you to capitalize on other people’s success and research.

Consider Design and Cost Limitations

Finally, when looking at the most common languages on the Internet and deciding whether to add one or more to your site, you need to consider your site design and the cost involved.

Why is the design important?

Because not all design is easy to convert to every language. For example, some languages are more verbose, meaning they need more or longer words to say the same thing as others. On the other hand, character-based languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tend to need a lot less space as they can express more information in a condensed way.

In addition, some languages go from right to left instead of the other way around. Arabic is one such example, and Hebrew is another. Either can mess up your layout because of different space requirements and you need to find a solution for that.

If you want to offer a language that’s very different from your original, you might need a whole different website design and layout. Are you prepared to create that? Does that make sense for the amount of extra traffic that this language will likely bring in?

Finally, some languages are cheaper to translate into than others. Spanish and English have a large pool of capable translators, other, less popular, or more complicated languages not so much. These are all important considerations.

Use TranslatePress to Translate Your Website Into Common Languages

Looking at the most spoken languages is a good start to start thinking about what to add to your WordPress website. However, once you have made a decision, it’s just as important that you have a good tool to implement them. At this point, we want to humbly suggest TranslatePress as that tool, and here is why.

Easy-to-Use Interface

In TranslatePress, most of the translation work happens in the same easy interface. It contains a preview of your site on the right while you do all the translating on the left.

Use the preview to navigate to the page you want to convert to another language. Then, choose any of the strings on it either via the drop-down menu, left and right arrows, or directly from the page.

This will open up a new text box on the left where you can add the translation. When done, simply save it and from now on the translated text will appear on your website.

Possibility to Translate Images

In addition to the above, TranslatePress also allows you to localize your images. This is especially important when you use text in your visuals. However, it can also make sense to use a whole other image for another region, especially to better represent the ethnicity of different regions.

Either way, in TranslatePress you can also select an image for translation from the interface and then provide an alternative on the left. It will appear automatically in the same way as your translated text.

Automatic Translation Options

In addition, TranslatePress offers automatic translations via Google Translate and DeepL (note that you need a license for the second option). Simply switch it on under Settings → TranslatePress → Automatic Translation , then acquire and paste an API key, save, and that’s mostly it.

With automatic translation enabled, when working in the translation interface and choosing a string, you will automatically find the equivalent there.

This is perfect for translating your website more quickly and also for any translation that doesn’t have to be perfect. Automatic translation is not as accurate as manual translation but can still be enough in a pinch.

Multilingual SEO

Finally, TranslatePress comes with a multlingual SEO pack (available in the premium version). This allows you to translate your page links, SEO titles, meta descriptions, ALT tags, and other important SEO markers.

It also creates multilingual sitemaps to submit to search engines and works with most popular WordPress SEO plugins. All of this help you to actually show up for search requests in your translated languages.

What Popular Internet Languages Will You Translate Your Site Into?

Knowing which languages are most spoken in the world and online is a good starting point when considering what to translate your website into. After all, when you add a language to your site that a lot of people speak, you can potentially reach hundreds of millions of additional visitors.

However, language popularity is just one factor to consider. As we have seen above, a lot more goes into what additional languages make sense on your site. Just because some are part of the top spoken languages in the world, it doesn’t mean they make sense for your particular Internet business or website. Use the guidelines above to come to a decision for yourself, then add TranslatePress to make it a reality.

What’s your process for choosing languages to translate your site into? Tell us in the comments below!

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The Most Spoken Languages: On the Internet and in Real Life

Even in a globalized world, language barriers have the potential to exclude people from access to information and participation in the global conversation. After all, what good is the world wide web if you speak a language whose footprint barely extends beyond the borders of your own country?

Thankfully, there’s English, the internet’s lingua franca, connecting people from all over the world. According to estimates from W3Techs , more than half of all websites use English as their content language. And while English is in fact the best bet if you want to maximize your potential audience online, its global footprint is not as large as one might think.

According to estimates from Ethnologue , a research center for language intelligence, roughly 1.46 billion people speak English around the world, of which roughly 380 million are native speakers. That makes English the most spoken language worldwide when including non-native speakers, ahead of Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by roughly 1.14 billion people worldwide, including 940 million native speakers. The 1.46 billion people who speak English still make up less than 20 percent of the world population, meaning that roughly 4 in 5 people in the world are unable to understand 50 percent of all websites, at least without a translation tool.

As the following chart shows, some widely-spoken languages, such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, are underrepresented on the internet, while others such as English, German and Russian have a larger footprint online than they have in the real world.

Description

This chart compares the share of websites using selected languages to the estimated share of internet users speaking those languages.

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Content-Language

The Content-Language representation header is used to describe the language(s) intended for the audience , so users can differentiate it according to their own preferred language.

For example, if " Content-Language: de-DE " is set, it says that the document is intended for German language speakers (however, it doesn't indicate the document is written in German. For example, it might be written in English as part of a language course for German speakers. If you want to indicate which language the document is written in, use the lang attribute instead).

If no Content-Language is specified, the default is that the content is intended for all language audiences. Multiple language tags are also possible, as well as applying the Content-Language header to various media types and not only to textual documents.

Multiple language tags are separated by a comma. Each language tag is a sequence of one or more case-insensitive subtags, each separated by a hyphen character (" - ", %x2D ). In most cases, a language tag consists of a primary language subtag that identifies a broad family of related languages (e.g., " en " = English) and is optionally followed by a series of subtags that refine or narrow that language's range (e.g., " en-CA " = the variety of English as communicated in Canada).

Note: Language tags are formally defined in BCP 47 , which rely on the ISO 639 standard (quite often the ISO 639-1 code list ) for language codes to be used.

Indicating the language a document is written in

The global lang attribute is used on HTML elements to indicate the language of an entire HTML document or parts of it.

Do not use this meta element like this for stating a document language:

Indicating a target audience for a resource

The Content-Language header is used to specify the page's intended audience and can indicate that this is more than one language.

Specifications

Browser compatibility.

BCD tables only load in the browser with JavaScript enabled. Enable JavaScript to view data.

• Accept-Language
• HTTP headers, meta elements and language information
• HTML lang attribute

Introduction to Web Accessibility

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Document and Content Language

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The Importance of Identifying Language

Screen readers can "speak" various languages—as long the content language is identified. If the screen reader does not support or cannot speak the defined language, the user might be informed of the content language, even if that content cannot be properly read.

Defining the document language also supports automated translation of content using tools like Google Translate.

For Level A conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) the document language must be programmatically defined. For Level AA WCAG conformance the language of parts of a page in a language different than the rest of the page must also be identified. This tells the screen reader to switch to that language (if it is able).

Specifying the "language of parts" of the page is only necessary for other-language content that is not generally understood in the document's primary language. "Los Angeles" and "piñata", for example, are Spanish words that are understood by English readers, so it would not be necessary to identify these as being Spanish on an English web page.

Properly defining the content language also allows the browser to properly display quotation marks for various languages when using the <q> element. The following examples are defined as German and French. The browser has generated the localized quotation marks appropriate to the language.

Mein Computer spricht Deutsch.

Mon ordinateur parle français.

Additionally, if the language is specified the browser can present:

• The appropriate characters for non-Latin text
• Localized date and time inputs (such as using MM/DD/YYYY vs. DD/MM/YYYY or 24-hour time vs. AM/PM time)
• Numbers with appropriate comma or period thousands separators
• Proper-language spellchecking for inputs

The lang attribute

The lang attribute is used to identify the language of the web page. This attribute must always be added to the <html> tag. It is given a value that identifies the natural language of the page. Adding <html lang="en"> , for example, would specify that the page is in English.

Similarly, the lang attribute can be added to other HTML elements within a page to indicate their natural language. <p lang="ja"> , for example, would indicate Japanese as the language for the paragraph.

Do not use the lang attribute to specify the language of content that is being linked or navigated to. If a link on an English web page to a Spanish translation presents text of "Spanish", the lang attribute is not used because "Spanish" is an English word. If the link instead presents text of " Español ", then lang="es" should be defined on the link.

When text in one language is read with the pronunciation rules of another, the results can make the content inaccessible. Below is a passage of text in English. The audio recording is a screen reader pronouncing this text as if it had lang="cs" (Czech).

Most people today can hardly conceive of life without the Internet. Some have argued that no other single invention has been more revolutionary since Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1400s. Now, at the click of a mouse, the world can be “at your fingertips”—that is, if you can use a mouse... and see the screen... and hear the audio—in other words, if you don't have a disability of any kind.

Identifying the document language is also important for Acrobat PDF files. The document language can be specified in Acrobat Professional or other PDF editing software.

Choosing Appropriate Language Tags

Over 8,000 language codes, defined by international specifications, encompass the worlds various languages, dialects, regions, etc. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) maintains a curated registry of possible and valid values . The W3C provides an excellent guide for choosing a language tag . You can also search for valid lang attribute values using this language subtag lookup tool . Be sure to read the guidance below to ensure the lang value used has the greatest accessibility support.

Primary language

The primary language is the major language of the web content. Two-character codes are available for nearly all primary languages. lang="en" is English, lang="de" is German, lang="zh" is Chinese, and lang="ar" is Arabic, for example.

Keep the lang attribute value as short as is appropriate. If the two-character primary language code is sufficient to identify the content language, use it.

Many primary languages have different sub-languages or dialects. English has different variants for Great Britain, Australia, and India, for example. Chinese has Mandarin and Cantonese and numerous other dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible. Despite this, specifying the primary language in a web page is typically sufficient.

In short, the language for the vast majority of web page content can be properly identified with the appropriate two-character primary language code. In some very rare cases a three-character code might be used for a very uncommon primary language, but only if a two-character code does not exist . Even though some ISO standards may define three-character codes for some primary languages (such as "spa" for Spanish), these are not found in the IANA registry and support for these in screen readers is very poor.

Extended languages

Sub-languages or extended languages are available for seven primary languages: Arabic ( ar ), Chinese ( zh ), Malay ( ms ), Swahili ( sw ), Uzbek ( uz ), Konkani ( kok ), and sign languages ( sgn ). Cantonese and Mandarin, for example, are extended languages of Chinese. It's possible to specify these extended languages using extensions to the primary language, such as lang="zh-yue" for Cantonese vs. lang="zh-cmn" for Mandarin, or via three-character language identifiers such as lang="yue" for Cantonese and lang="cmn" for Mandarin.

Support for extended languages is very poor in screen readers. It is strongly recommended to use either the primary language alone (see above) or, if necessary, an appropriate region subtag (see below).

Script subtags

Content can sometimes be presented using a script or characters that are different from the primary script for a language. For example, 汉语 are the simplified Chinese characters for the word "Chinese". Written in Latin characters this is "Hànyǔ". The word "Hànyǔ" could be identified as Chinese written in Latin script with lang="zh-Latn" . Script subtags are always 4 characters added after the primary language and a hyphen.

However, screen reader support for script subtags is poor, and they are very rarely needed. The script identifier is often ignored causing the screen reader to apply the primary language, which typically fails entirely. <p lang="zh-Latn">Hànyǔ</p> on an English page, for example, would likely be considered Chinese due to the "zh" primary language, but the Latin characters are not Chinese characters so the content would likely be unreadable (the screen reader is expecting Chinese characters, not Latin characters). Omitting the lang attribute altogether would cause the Latin characters to be properly read in the page's defined language, English in this case.

In short, script subtags should typically be avoided.

Region subtags

If it becomes necessary to differentiate content in various dialects or sub-languages—such as a page that is highlighting differences between Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Mexico—or if the written content aligns with a dialect that has distinct regional differences, then a region subtag can be used. For example, lang="es-ES" identifies Peninsular Spanish as typically spoken or read in Spain as opposed to lang="es-MX" which identifies Spanish as spoken or read in Mexico.

If a screen reader supports the regional differences—such as having language voices installed for both Peninsular and Mexican Spanish—then the screen reader may switch to the appropriate dialect.

However, region subtags are typically ignored , especially if the screen reader's default language matches the primary language specified. This is because it is presumed the user will prefer and better understand their default dialect over a different dialect of that same language. The numerous screen reader users in Great Britain, for example, will typically hear Great Britain English on U.S. web sites, even if the page has lang="en-US" specified and the user has the US English language voice installed.

Only use region subtags when it is necessary to differentiate content in different dialects that may not be mutually intelligible. A web site that provides content in both Mandarin and Cantonese (one of which may not be understood by speakers of the other) would typically differentiate them using lang="zh-CN" and lang="zh-HK" respectively. Region subtags are much more reliably supported than extended language codes. Because the various dialects of English are mutually intelligible, and because the screen reader user will define their preferred dialect, using lang="en" is typically sufficient even for a site that provides U.K., India, Australian, U.S., or other English-language versions.

There are other variations for the lang attribute value that are permissible, but the rules above apply to the vast majority of web page content.

• Keep the language identifier as short as possible. In most cases a two-character language identifier is sufficient and optimal.
• Three-character language identifiers, extended language subtags, and script subtags should typically be avoided (or, at a minimum, well tested in screen readers).
• Region sub-tags can be used in some cases where it is vital to differentiate dialects.

Screen Reader Support

Two-character lang attribute values are usually adequate for screen reader support. Support for three-character and extended, script, and region subtags varies based on the browser and screen reader in use, and the language voices that are supported and installed. When in doubt, test. Support for inline language changes, such as for a <span> or <img> element is also varied. When possible it is best to define the lang attribute on a block level element, such as a <p> , <blockquote> , or similar.

To read the content in the defined language, the screen reader must support that language. All modern screen readers have support for numerous languages. In some screen reader the user must manually install or configure language voices or "language packs".

If a screen reader encounters a lang attribute which specifies a language for which a matching language voice is not installed or supported, it will usually identify the language of the content. The screen reader might pronounce "Spanish", for example, for content with lang="es" if a Spanish language voice is not enabled or installed.

Screen readers will typically attempt to read content that is pronounceable, even if the defined language is not supported. Polish content, for example, is written in Latin characters, so will read by the screen reader with an English default voice (though it will be read without proper pronunciation, inflections, etc.—perhaps sounding like a beginner Polish class). Chinese characters, on the other hand, are not directly pronounceable in English, so the screen reader would not read them, though it may announce "Chinese" to inform the user that Chinese language content is present.

• Google Search Central
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• Português – Brasil
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Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites

If your site offers different content to users in different languages, countries, or regions, you can optimize Google Search results for your site.

What's the difference between multilingual and multi-regional?

• A multilingual website is any website that offers content in more than one language. For example, a Canadian business with English and French versions of its site. Google Search tries to find pages that match the language of the searcher.
• A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in different countries. For example, a product manufacturer that ships to both Canada and the United States. Google Search tries to find the right locale page for the searcher.

Some sites are both multi-regional and multilingual: for example, a site might have different versions for the USA and for Canada, and both French and English versions of the Canadian content.

Managing multilingual versions of your site

If you have identical content in multiple languages on your site, here are some tips for helping users (and Google Search) find the right page:

Use different URLs for different language versions

Google recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page rather than using cookies or browser settings to adjust the content language on the page.

If you use different URLs for different languages, use hreflang annotations to help Google search results link to the correct language version of a page.

If you prefer to dynamically change content or reroute the user based on language settings, be aware that Google might not find and crawl all your variations . This is because the Googlebot crawler usually originates from the USA. In addition, the crawler sends HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language in the request header.

Tell Google about your different language versions

Google supports several different methods for labeling language or region variants of a page , including hreflang annotations and sitemaps. Mark your pages appropriately.

Make sure the page language is obvious

Google uses the visible content of your page to determine its language. We don't use any code-level language information such as lang attributes, or the URL. You can help Google determine the language correctly by using a single language for content and navigation on each page, and by avoiding side-by-side translations.

Translating only the boilerplate text of your pages while keeping the bulk of your content in a single language (as often happens on pages featuring user-generated content) can create a bad user experience if the same content appears multiple times in search results with various boilerplate languages.

Use robots.txt to block search engines from crawling automatically translated pages on your site. Automated translations don't always make sense and could be viewed as spam. More importantly, a poor or artificial-sounding translation can harm your site's perception.

Let the user switch the page language

If you have multiple versions of a page:

• Avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version of a site. For example, don't redirect based on what you think the user's language may be. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.
• Consider adding hyperlinks to other language versions of a page . That way users can click to choose a different language version of the page.

Use language-specific URLs

It's fine to use localized words in the URL, or to use an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) . However, be sure to use UTF-8 encoding in the URL (in fact, we recommend using UTF-8 wherever possible) and remember to escape the URLs properly when linking to them.

Targeting site content to a specific country (geotargeting)

You can target your website or parts of it to users in a single specific country that speaks a specific language. This can improve your page rankings in the target country, but at the expense of results in other locales or languages.

To geotarget your site on Google:

• Page or site level: Use locale-specific URLs for your site or page .
• Page level: Use hreflang or sitemaps to tell Google which pages apply to which locations or languages.

Remember that geotargeting isn't an exact science, so it's important to consider users who land on the "wrong" version of your site. One way to do this could be to show links on all pages for users to select their region and/or language of choice.

Using locale-specific URLs

Consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to geotarget your site, or parts of it, to different regions. The following table describes your options:

de.example.com

example.com/de/

site.com?loc=de

How does Google determine a target locale?

Google relies on a number of signals to determine the best target audience for a page:

• Country-code top-level domain names (ccTLDs). These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China), and therefore provide a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country. Some countries have restrictions on who can use ccTLDs, so be sure to do your research first. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv and .me) as gTLDs, as we've found that users and website owners frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted. See Google's list of gTLDs .
• hreflang statements , whether in tags, headers, or sitemaps.
• Server location (through the IP address of the server). The server location is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site's intended audience. Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal.
• Other signals. Other signals to identify the intended audience of your site can include local addresses and phone numbers on the pages, the use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, or signals from your Business Profile (where available).

What Google doesn't do:

• Google crawls the web from different locations around the world. We do not attempt to vary the crawler source used for a single site in order to find any possible variations in a page. Therefore, make sure you explicitly tell Google about any locale or language variation that your site exposes, using one of the methods shown here (such as hreflang entries, ccTLDs, or explicit links).
• Google ignores locational meta tags (like geo.position or distribution ) or geotargeting HTML attributes.

Handling duplicate pages with multilingual/multi-regional sites

If you provide similar or duplicate content on different URLs in the same language as part of a multi-regional site (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show similar German language content), pick a preferred version and use the rel="canonical" element and hreflang tags to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

Generic top-level domains

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are domains that aren't associated with specific locations. If your site has a generic top-level domain such as .com, .org, or any of the following domains, and wants to target users in a particular geographic location, explicitly set a country target using one of the methods described previously.

Google treats the following top level domains as gTLDs:

• and many more...

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License . For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies . Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2024-03-18 UTC.

WEBSITE ESSENTIALS

How to build a multilingual website to expand your reach

• Cecilia Lazzaro Blasbalg

As you look to expand your online audience, you might have already considered building a multilingual website . A site with content in the various languages you serve enables you to communicate effectively with your visitors.

There are other reasons why you might want your online presence to be multilingual and this website type . Your business might be located in a popular tourist destination, having the potential to attract clients spanning far beyond the neighborhood, state or even country.

In this article, you will learn how to make a website that is easily accessible to all languages and localized to different regions. Therefore, we put together a step-by-step guide to help you start.

What is a multilingual website?

A multilingual website is what it sounds like - a website available in multiple languages. This means that visitors to your website can access your content in their preferred language. Multilingual websites are becoming increasingly common, as more and more businesses are looking to reach a global audience.

How to build a multilingual website

Translate your website content

Adapt your visual content

Modify your SEO for all languages

Enable your site to be multilingual

01. Translate your website content

A multilingual site’s most essential component is translation. If you don’t speak the additional languages you’re adding to your site, you have several options for translating your content.

You can invest in a professional translator, or you can use a neural machine translation service for a quick fix, like Google Translate. If you’re using the latter, make sure to review and proofread your translated content as there are many grammatical or cultural nuances that can get lost in translation.

Wix Multilingual allows you to enjoy Google Translate’s powerful linguistic services, in addition to manually editing your translation directly on your site’s editor.

During the translation process, make sure not to overlook any parts of your site’s copy, from the text on your homepage design and menu, to the retailing details on your online store , to the content in your online course . Starting a blog with a blog maker ? You'll need to think about your translation options here too.

Tip: Learn how to make a multilingual blog to support your content.

One small detail to note in your translations is the date. To all those out there who have missed a deadline or meeting because the format of the month and date was different from their personal custom (Is 12/04 April 12th or December 4th?), you know exactly how confusing this can be. Either do some research into the conventional date and time format for your secondary language(s), or play it safe by simply writing out the full month.

As you’re translating your website content, you may experience that some things can’t transfer from one language to another, even requiring more context for clarity.

Therefore, pay attention to cultural references. For example, have you jazzed up your call-to-action text with puns particular to one language, or country? First of all, you deserve a round of applause for a job well done acing your engaging microcopy. Second, make sure to find equivalent phrases, or to take a similar tone, when switching over to your secondary language(s).

While translating you can consider using website under construction templates .

02. Adapt your visual content

Text is not the only element on your page that you can “translate.” The same principle goes for images, too. If you offer a localized service, for example, and want to display photos of it from sites across the globe, you can select the requisite images to match the regional language of the text.

Say you have the Statue of Liberty featured on your homepage to illustrate a cultural landmark. You might want to swap that image with the Eiffel Tower for your French-speaking audience on your multilingual site. International visitors will have a better connection with your site if you localize your visual content, since images carry different meanings for different cultures.

03. Modify your SEO for all languages

Once you have completed the translation stage, it’s time to make sure your work can be found in all of its linguistic glory across the internet. That entails optimizing each of your new pages for search engines.

Each international market comes with its own internet searching habits and SEO needs. Start by conducting keyword research in your new language - and update your site's SEO settings accordingly. That way, potential customers searching the web for a business or solution like yours in their native language will have a higher chance of stumbling across your site.

04. Enable your site to be multilingual

Now that your web content is all ready to go, it’s time to let visitors of all different languages know that they can access your website.

Show off your linguistic talent with an easy-to-spot language menu . You can customize it to your liking, representing each language with mini flag icons, written abbreviations or a combination of the two, to signal to users the options that are available for their choosing.

We suggest placing this language toggle in your primary header navigation. You can even use subtle animation features, to draw visitors’ attention to the translation option. The longer they have to search, the higher the chance they might leave in favor of a page they can actually understand.

A word for the wise: if you offer two or three languages, flag or word icons that appear right in the header menu will be perfect. If you offer more, though, consider a drop-down menu of lettered abbreviations to avoid clutter.

The process of creating a multilingual site can feel daunting at first. Yet, believe it or not, once you’ve created a professional website in your primary language, you’ve already taken a major step toward simplifying this process. The site structure you’ve created can now serve as a roadmap to help you in adapting to a second, or even third and fourth, language.

If you’re building your website on Wix, you’ll find that there’s absolutely no need to recreate a new site for each language. Every time you add in a new language with Wix Multilingual , a parallel copy is automatically created for you. And if you change any element in one of your languages, the same change is immediately reflected across all of your multiple versions.

You might also want to consider the pros and cons between a static and dynamic site before hitting publish.

How to create a Wix Multilingual site

Log in to your Wix account or sign up and pick your favorite professional online template to get started.

In the Wix Editor, select ‘Settings’ from the top menu bar.

Click ‘Multilingual’ and then ‘Get Started.’

Choose the language(s) you want.

Set your main language and the flag you want to display with it.

Select ‘Next.’

Set your secondary language (note: you can add additional languages later) and the flag you want to display with the language.

Click ‘Next’ and then ‘Start Now.’

Translate the content on your site including text, photos and videos. You can switch between languages using the flags on the top left corner of the Editor, and access your Multilingual Dashboard by selecting ‘Settings’ > ‘Multilingual’ from the top bar.

Click Publish to make your changes live.

Learn more: How much does a website cost

Benefits of a multilingual website

As you can see, creating a multilingual website can be demanding, so you need to be sure it's worth it. Here are some of the most important benefits:

Reach a wider audience: A multilingual website can help you reach a wider audience by making your content available to people who speak different languages. This is especially beneficial if you're targeting a specific country or region.

Improve SEO: When you translate your website content into multiple languages, you can rank for keywords in those languages. This can help you attract more visitors to your website from different parts of the world.

Build trust with international customers: When visitors to your website see that you've taken the time to translate your content into their language, they'll be more likely to trust you and do business with you.

Increase sales: 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information in their native language. A multilingual website can help you increase sales by making it easier for people from different countries to buy your products or services.

Provide a better user experience: A multilingual website provides a better user experience for people who speak different languages because it's easier for them to find what they're looking for and interact with your website.

If you are looking to expand your business internationally, a multilingual website is a must-have.

Challenges of a multilingual website

There are a few challenges that you may face when creating a multilingual website. These include:

Cost in money and time: Translating your website into multiple languages can be expensive, especially if you use professional translation services. It also can be a time-consuming process, depending on the amount of content you need to translate.

Localization: On top of translating your website content, you may also need to localize your website. This means adapting your website to the cultural and linguistic norms of the countries you are targeting.

Managing content: Managing multilingual content can be complex. You need to make sure that all of your content is translated accurately and that the translations are consistent. You also need to continually update your translations whenever you add content.

Despite these challenges, creating a multilingual website is a worthwhile investment if you're looking to expand your reach.

Multilingual website examples

Creating a multilingual website is a great way to reach a global audience and cater to users who speak different languages. Here are five examples of multilingual websites:

Wikipedia : Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is available in multiple languages. Users can easily switch between languages to access content in their preferred language. This approach enables Wikipedia to provide information to a diverse audience worldwide.

Nike: Nike, a global brand, offers a multilingual website to serve its international customer base. Visitors can choose their preferred language, and the website adapts to provide content, product descriptions and support in that language.

IKEA: IKEA, a multinational furniture retailer, has a multilingual website to accommodate its global customer base. Users can select their country and language preferences to access product information, shopping options and other content in their chosen language.

Wix : Wix, the website builder has multiple language pages to reach and support its global range of users. Examples include de.wix.com (German), fr.wix.com (French).

Pro tip: Beginners might also enjoy using Wix’s AI website builder , a first-of-its-kind chat-based experience that taps into Wix's ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) to help you design a website in record time. Simply chat with AI about the vision for your site and you’ll get a complete website that you can customize as you wish.

How to build a multilingual website FAQ

How do multilingual websites work.

There are two main approaches for multilingual websites:

Subdirectories: Different language versions of the site are hosted in separate folders, like .com/en and .com/es. Visitors typically choose their preferred language through a flag icon or dropdown menu.

Content Management Systems (CMS) : Discover plugins or built-in features to manage translated content within the same website framework. Users can switch languages seamlessly within the site.

How do I translate a website into multiple languages?

What are some tips for designing a multilingual website, can i use templates for a multilingual website, how do you structure a multilingual website, what is an example of a bilingual website, related posts.

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10 best practices to improve your multilingual website SEO

Building a multilingual online presence isn’t easy. From website translations to localizing your social media and advertising—there’s a lot to consider. And when it comes to multilingual website SEO (search engine optimization), things get a little more complicated. 

When setting up a multilingual website, there are a few essential SEO factors to consider. Most importantly, you want to ensure that people find the correct pages for their language and location. 

Let’s take a deeper look into what localization SEO is and why it’s important—plus ten tips for improving your multilingual website SEO.

See also: How to localize your website and why it matters

What is localization SEO?

A multilingual website is any website that offers content in more than one language. Localization SEO is the process of optimizing that website for the different languages. This includes translating website content , meta titles, meta tags, descriptions and targeted keywords.

It’s more than simply translating content. SEO localization also pays attention to how people search for content and the search terms they’re using in the locale you’re targeting. By using these location-based keywords within your content, you’ll increase your organic reach in those specific regions.

“There’s no point in creating brilliant content if no one is going to access it, or no one’s going to consume it.” – – Estefania Veira , London-based marketing campaign manager at Clyde & Co .

Multilingual SEO includes:

• Building a website in each target language using a logical structure
• Creating unique and localized multilingual content
• Catering to the various website development requirements that prevent search engines from penalizing your multi-regional websites
• Placing different website language versions within an appropriate scheme

See also: Translation vs. localization: What’s the difference and why should you care?

Why is multilingual website SEO important?

If you’re marketing across different countries, you’re likely targeting audiences from many different markets that speak multiple languages.

In this case, basic website translation is not enough—and machine translations don’t always make sense and can be viewed as spam.

While it may be tempting to rely on Google Translate or ChatGPT for non-English speakers to understand the content on your website, you’ll get far better results if you have a dedicated multilingual website SEO strategy. 

Because people tend to first search on Google in their native language. That’s why it’s in your best interest to optimize your SEO strategy according to what your international audience is searching for in their own language.

“I’m Brazilian so I’ll probably Google something in Portuguese before I search something in English, and a lot of people don’t speak English. So in those countries, it’s just easier to search for information in your own language.” – Allan Formigoni , Lisbon-based content and email marketing manager at WeTravel .

Plus, the elements that contribute to effective international SEO also tend to improve your overall user experience—so paying attention to multilingual SEO best practices is a win for both your organic traffic and customer experience. 

See also: 5 ways to ensure a quality localization – even if you don’t speak the language

How does Google handle multilingual searches?

Google Search automatically determines the language of search results based on various factors, including user language settings on different devices. This means that searchers don’t have to constantly change their language settings to get results in the different languages they use.

Google also shows helpful results in multiple languages, even if they don’t match the user’s settings or search query. For example, someone in France can search in French, English or Arabic and expect to get results in the appropriate language. The search engine is continuously improving its language matching systems to provide the most helpful information in the languages that people prefer.

Here’s what Google says content creators should do:

“We encourage publishers in areas where several languages are commonly used to make content in those different languages rather than in just one that is widely understood. People appreciate content written in their preferred languages, and Google itself would like to show it when it is available.”

10 multilingual SEO best practices

Google has laid out a few best practices for multilingual websites, and there are a few methods to improve your local SEO rankings. 

Here are ten ways to improve your multilingual website to beat the algorithm and bring in more organic traffic.

1. Use dedicated URLs

Your URL is the first part of your website that users see, and it’s also where you should start when doing localization SEO. Each of your language or country pages needs to have its own URL so that Google can effectively crawl, index and rank your sites.

Make sure to include a language indicator in your URLs to help search engines identify the website language. For example, an original page might be www.mywebsite.com, while the French version is www.mywebsite.com/fr/. 

Where you place the language indicator depends on which URL structure you’re using. There are three structures to choose from:

• Top-level domain (e.g. www.mywebsite.fr)
• Subdomain (e.g. www.fr.mywebsite.com)
• Subdirectory (e.g. www.mywebsite.com/fr/)

Each of these has its pros and cons, and there is no clear winner in terms of SEO, but subdirectories are probably the easiest to set up and maintain.

2. Don’t forget to apply hreflang tags

Make sure to use hreflang annotations to help Google determine both the language of the page and which region it is intended for. These tags are inserted in the header section of the original page or submitted via a sitemap. Multiple hreflang tags can be added if a page is intended for multiple regions.

The more languages and regions that you have, the more complicated this process gets. It’s best to get the help of a multilingual SEO agency to ensure you get this right!

Adding hreflang attributes is also important for multi-regional websites in the same language, but are slightly different for various regions. For example, you may have localized English US vs UK websites. You’ll need to let Google know the content is “canonical” or risk search engines penalizing your websites for duplicate content. By adding hreflang attributes and markup to your sitemap, Google will be able to understand which website goes with which language and country. For more details, read  here .

See also: Top 7 localization tools to optimize your website

3. Stick to one language per page

Google uses the visible content of your page to determine its language—so you need to make the language obvious by sticking to one language for content and navigation . Side-by-side translations are a no-go!

Having more than one language on a page also impacts the user experience, as it can be confusing and the context can be easily misinterpreted. 

When translating a page, make sure to translate all content—including navigation text and user-generated content.

See also: Website translation and localization: 7 key steps

4. Translate the “hidden” parts of your website

SEO incorporates both the content that users see and the content they don’t—and both are equally important.

When creating multilingual websites, it’s easy to forget about your website’s “hidden” parts. This refers to the text that works in the background and the pages that users only see when they perform a certain action.

These include:

• Metadata descriptions
• Metatag titles
• Alt text for images
• Checkout pages
• Contact pages
• Newsletter sign-up forms
• Error messages

The metadata and metatag titles are particularly important for SEO as they appear in the search results on Google.

Tip : Check if all website metadata has been translated by searching site:example.com on Google—replacing “example.com” with the name of your domain. This will show you all the pages that Google has indexed on your website. 

Do you work in global marketing? Sign up for our monthly newsletter for real work-related tales from our international team and insights on localization, global content marketing and everything in-between.

5. Use location-based keywords

Keywords aren’t universal. It’s best to do specific keyword research for each language and region your website is targeting, as simply translating your keywords won’t be good enough.

Location-based keywords don’t just apply to language-specific keywords. Different English-speaking countries use different words for certain things. For example, in the US, they use the word “cookies” to search for cookies, while they’ll search for “biscuits” in the UK. You’ll also find that some keywords have more or less competition or search volume in different languages and regions.

Your keywords form the foundation of your multilingual website SEO strategy, so it’s worth putting in the extra effort to find the best terms for each language and location that you’re targeting.

“There aren’t many websites that target Arabic or Egyptian audiences, so the competition is very low. But when it comes to English, the competition is very high. The same word in English has a lot more bids on it than in Arabic.” – Nermeen Habashy , Egypt-based head of content quality and SEO at B.TECH .

See also: Localization strategy: A guide to growing a global audience

6. Invest in quality translations

Quality translations are essential for multilingual SEO success. Accurate and natural-sounding translations ensure that your content resonates with the target audience, maintaining credibility and engagement.

Avoiding automated and AI translation tools is crucial to prevent inaccuracies and maintain the integrity of your message. Invest in professional translators who understand the nuances of the language and culture to deliver content that effectively communicates your brand’s message across different languages.

See also: Why outsourcing translation services actually saves money

7. Always localize your content

Creating localized content involves tailoring your messaging to specific cultural contexts, preferences and behaviors of different target audiences. This approach goes beyond mere translation, encompassing adaptations that resonate with local customs, traditions and colloquialisms.

By addressing the unique needs of each market, you can establish stronger connections with your audience, drive engagement, and improve SEO performance by providing relevant and valuable content in multiple languages.

VeraContent example:

We offer content creation and localization services to Visable, focusing on optimizing their blogs like Visable 360 ,  Inside Business  (wlw) and  EUROPAGES . . Typically, Visable sends us German articles to translate into French, English, Italian and Spanish for their Europages blog.

While some articles can be translated without significant alterations, others are too specific to the German market, featuring local data and insights unsuitable for Visable’s wider audience. In such cases, our linguists rework the content, incorporating local examples and findings to better resonate with their respective markets.

For example, in an article discussing the impact of strikes and blockades on the B2B market in Germany, our linguists researched and tailored the content to reflect similar occurrences in their own countries. Check out our full work sample on this example .

The French translation (left) versus the Italian translation (right) for an article for Visable.

8. Consider local hosting

Hosting your website on servers located geographically close to your target audience offers several benefits for multilingual SEO. Local hosting improves website loading speed, which enhances user experience and reduces bounce rates. It also signals to search engines that your website is relevant to users in that region, potentially boosting your rankings in local search results.

Additionally, local hosting can help mitigate issues related to latency and improve website performance, contributing to overall SEO success across different language markets.

9. Cross-link your internal pages

Cross-linking involves strategically linking related pages within your website’s content across different language versions . This practice helps search engines understand the relationship between equivalent pages in different languages, improving the overall structure and crawlability of your website.

By linking relevant content, you can also encourage users to explore more pages on your site, increasing engagement and reducing bounce rates. Effective cross-linking enhances the user experience and strengthens your website’s authority and relevance in search results.

Tip : Be careful not to cross-link between languages! It’s easily done when adapting previously published content in another language. Pay attention to ensure you’re always linking to the right language page.

10. Build local backlinks

Local backlinks signal to search engines that your website is reputable and relevant to users in specific regions, boosting your rankings in local search results. Engage in outreach efforts to relevant local businesses, organizations and influencers to build relationships and earn quality backlinks.

By securing backlinks from authoritative local sources, you can improve your website’s visibility, credibility and trustworthiness in each language market.

Make use of SEO multilingual services

Perfecting SEO for your business is challenging—especially when you’re doing it in multiple languages at once. Since localized SEO plays such a key role in attracting the right audience and providing a strong user experience, it’s worth using professional multilingual SEO services. 

At VeraContent, we specialize in everything content related to help your multi language SEO strategy perform. Reach out to us today to find out if you qualify for a Free Content Consultation.

If you’re entering a new local market, download our practical worksheet to ensure your brand’s content strategy resonates with your target audience.

Get your free guide by filling in the form below!

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Get real-time translation of videos you’re watching with subtitles in your preferred language. Select the translate icon when you hover over a video to get started. 

Real-time video translation

At the moment, audio sources in Spanish and Korean can be translated to English. Likewise, audio sources in English can be translation to Hindi, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. 

Right now, video translation works on certain websites, such as YouTube, Reuters, CNBC News, Bloomberg, Money Control (IN), LinkedIn, and Coursera, but we’re always working to offer more choices in the future. 

Tips and Tricks

The translation is done completely on your device, meaning that no data from the video leaves your machine. This means that no segment of the video or audio content ever exits the machine or is processed in the cloud. 

There are many factors that affect how accurate the translation is, such as the background music, number of speakers, source language, etc. We are continuously working to improve the quality of translation. However, users should keep in mind that AI generated content may have errors. 

• * Feature availability and functionality may vary by device type, market, and browser version.

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Justice Department Secures Agreement to Address Language Barriers for Families in the Cherry Creek, Colorado, School District

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The Justice Department announced today that it secured a settlement agreement with the Cherry Creek School District (CCSD), one of the largest school districts in Colorado, to significantly improve language access services for parents with limited English proficiency. The agreement resolves allegations that the district failed to communicate with these parents in a language they could understand, denying them important information about their children’s education.

“No parent should be left in the dark about their child’s education,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Open and effective communication between schools and parents, including parents with limited English proficiency, is essential to safeguarding students’ equal access to educational opportunities. The Justice Department will continue to ensure school districts take steps to help parents overcome language barriers that prevent them from participating fully in their children’s education.”

“Parents with limited English proficiency face barriers to understanding how public schools work,” said U.S. Attorney Cole Finegan for the District of Colorado. “This agreement is intended to ensure that the Cherry Creek School District implements policies and practices to enable all parents in the district to participate meaningfully in their children’s education. We urge all school districts in Colorado to review their practices to ensure that they are complying with their obligations to provide language assistance services to parents with limited English proficiency.”

The CCSD serves about 53,000 students whose parents speak more than 150 languages. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado received multiple complaints alleging that parents with limited English proficiency could not meaningfully participate in important school programs and activities because the district did not provide them with appropriate and effective language assistance services. The complaints alleged, for example, that the district did not provide interpreters and translation services to parents with limited English proficiency when they enrolled their children in the district’s schools and did not provide such services during expulsion hearings and other disciplinary proceedings.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office, in coordination with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, investigated the complaints under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974.

To resolve the department’s investigation, the district has agreed to improve its communications in critical areas, including:

• Enrollment: The district will identify parents with limited English proficiency and who are seeking to enroll their children in district schools, document their preferred language of communication and provide them with language assistance services to help them understand the enrollment process.
• Student disciplinary proceedings: The district will translate letters that involve suspension and expulsion into the preferred language of parents with limited English proficiency and provide language assistance services during disciplinary proceedings that could lead to suspension or expulsion.
• Engagement with parents with limited English proficiency: The district will administer surveys and hold listening sessions in over a dozen languages to better understand the communications needs of parents with limited English proficiency.

The enforcement of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 is a top priority of the Civil Rights Division. Additional information about the Civil Rights Division is available on its website at www.justice.gov/crt , and additional information about the work of the Educational Opportunities Section is available at www.justice.gov/crt/educational-opportunities-section .

To report a possible civil rights violation to the Civil Rights Division, please visit www.civilrights.justice.gov/ . Additional information about the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s civil rights enforcement program can be found at www.justice.gov/usao-co/civil-rights-enforcement .

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• 21 May 2024

First ‘bilingual’ brain-reading device decodes Spanish and English words

• Amanda Heidt 0

Amanda Heidt is a freelance journalist in southeastern Utah.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Medical imaging shows brain activity during speech production (artificially coloured). Credit: Zephyr/SPL

For the first time, a brain implant has helped a bilingual person who is unable to articulate words to communicate in both of his languages. An artificial-intelligence (AI) system coupled to the brain implant decodes, in real time, what the individual is trying to say in either Spanish or English.

The findings 1 , published on 20 May in Nature Biomedical Engineering , provide insights into how our brains process language , and could one day lead to long-lasting devices capable of restoring multilingual speech to people who can’t communicate verbally.

“This new study is an important contribution for the emerging field of speech-restoration neuroprostheses,” says Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. Even though the study included only one participant and more work remains to be done, “there’s every reason to think that this strategy will work with higher accuracy in the future when combined with other recent advances”, Stavisky says.

Speech-restoring implant

The person at the heart of the study, who goes by the nickname Pancho, had a stroke at age 20 that paralysed much of his body. As a result, he can moan and grunt but cannot speak clearly. In his thirties, Pancho partnered with Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, to investigate the stroke’s lasting effects on his brain. In a groundbreaking study published in 2021 2 , Chang’s team surgically implanted electrodes on Pancho’s cortex to record neural activity, which was translated into words on a screen.

Pancho’s first sentence — ‘My family is outside’ — was interpreted in English. But Pancho is a native Spanish speaker who learnt English only after his stroke. It’s Spanish that still evokes in him feelings of familiarity and belonging. “What languages someone speaks are actually very linked to their identity,” Chang says. “And so our long-term goal has never been just about replacing words, but about restoring connection for people.”

Brain-reading device is best yet at decoding ‘internal speech’

To achieve this goal, the team developed an AI system to decipher Pancho’s bilingual speech. This effort, led by Chang’s PhD student Alexander Silva, involved training the system as Pancho tried to say nearly 200 words. His efforts to form each word created a distinct neural pattern that was recorded by the electrodes.

The authors then applied their AI system, which has a Spanish module and an English one, to phrases as Pancho tried to say them aloud. For the first word in a phrase, the Spanish module chooses the Spanish word that matches the neural pattern best. The English component does the same, but chooses from the English vocabulary instead. For example, the English module might choose ‘she’ as the most likely first word in a phrase and assess its probability of being correct to be 70%, whereas the Spanish one might choose ‘estar’ (to be) and measure its probability of being correct at 40%.

Word for word

From there, both modules attempt to build a phrase. They each choose the second word based on not only the neural-pattern match but also whether it is likely to follow the first one. So ‘I am’ would get a higher probability score than ‘I not’. The final output produces two sentences — one in English and one in Spanish — but the display screen that Pancho faces shows only the version with the highest total probability score.

The modules were able to distinguish between English and Spanish on the basis of the first word with 88% accuracy and they decoded the correct sentence with an accuracy of 75%. Pancho could eventually have candid, unscripted conversations with the research team. “After the first time we did one of these sentences, there were a few minutes where we were just smiling,” Silva says.

Two languages, one brain area

The findings revealed unexpected aspects of language processing in the brain. Some previous experiments using non-invasive tools have suggested that different languages activate distinct parts of the brain 3 . But the authors’ examination of the signals recorded directly in the cortex found that “a lot of the activity for both Spanish and English was actually from the same area”, Silva says.

Furthermore, Pancho’s neurological responses didn’t seem to differ much from those of children who grew up bilingual, even though he was in his thirties when he learnt English — in contrast to the results of previous studies. Together, these findings suggest to Silva that different languages share at least some neurological features, and that they might be generalizable to other people.

Kenji Kansaku, a neurophysiologist at Dokkyo Medical University in Mibu, Japan, who was not involved in the study, says that in addition to adding participants, a next step will be to study languages “with very different articulatory properties” to English, such as Mandarin or Japanese. This, Silva says, is something he’s already looking into, along with ‘code switching’, or the shifting from one language to another in a single sentence. “Ideally, we’d like to give people the ability to communicate as naturally as possible.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01451-4

Silva, A. B. et al. Nature Biomed. Eng . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-024-01207-5 (2024).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Moses, D. A. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 385 , 217–227 (2021).

Kim, K. H. S., Relkin, N. R., Lee, K.-M. & Hirsch, J. Nature 388 , 171–174 (1997).

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