Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post

I was surprised that Chinese was slightly ahead of Japanese. I know that China has a much larger population, but I would assume that a far larger percentage of Japan's population has Internet access compared with China.

I wonder if technical issues related to the encoding of Chinese and Japanese иероглифы (анг. "characters") is part of the reason? According to wikipedia, Japan has been more resistant than China to adopting the Unicode standard as a replacement for older formats. So if most Chinese-language websites are Unicode-compliant, but many Japanese sites are not, that could partly explain why Japanese is behind Chinese in web statistics.

Another possible reason: As far as I know, in countries like the US and Canada, Chinese-speaking immigrants significantly outnumber Japanese-speaking immigrants. So the presence of bilingual Anglo-Chinese communities in North America (and the UK, Australia, NZ) would tend to increase the number of Chinese-language sites on the web.
Here are two more possible explanations which are to be checked.
1. Japanese much better speak English than Chinese and some parts of their activity (professional) goes in English.
2. Japanese language uses several writing systems, one of them (kanji) is actually the same as Chinese one. Maybe it is recognized as Chinese by automatics? If it is so, all Japanese sites also counted as Chinese.

So I'm curious about the percentage of users on the Russian-language internet who are using Russian as a second language or lingua franca, even though Russian is not their native language.
Well, you can easily meet people from xUSSR countries in internet speaking Russian, but mainly they speak Russian at native level.