Spanish is third most-used Internet language

New York: Spanish is the third most-used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese, according to a report.

The report titled Spanish on the Web was prepared by the Fundacion Telefonica, an institution created by Spain's Grupo Telefonica.

It was the result of an investigation led by Jose Luis Garcia Delgado, Guillermo Rojo and Mercedes Sanchez.

Spanish-speakers are the third-largest language group among Internet users, with eight percent of the total, after English users (38 percent) and Chinese users (22 percent).

English is the language with the greatest online presence, with about one billion pages, followed by Chinese, with more than 800 million pages.

Argentina, Chile and Spain are the Spanish-speaking countries where more than 50 percent of the public have online connections, with the proportion reaching 70 percent in the European nation, according to the study.

Spoken by nearly 500 million people in 21 countries, "Spanish is in second place as a language of international communication by number of speakers", Garcia Delgado said.

The report shows that Latino websurfers in the US are one of the most active online populations.

According to the data, 47 percent of those users spend more than an hour online each day, compared to just 44 percent who spend an hour or more watching television.

"That situation is possibly related to the fact that a good part of the Hispanics in the US already have a more acceptable level of education as well as a tendency to preserve the language," Garcia Delgado added.

"Spanish occupies the No 3 position worldwide on the Internet both in number of users (136 million) as well as in web pages (675 million)," according to the study.

Spanish on the Web also discusses the consequences that the Internet has in the life of languages, important features and statistics about the Internet in Spanish-speaking countries and the situation of the electronic press in Spanish.