Quartz:

Language barriers in globalization are hardly a new issue. So why the sudden drive for polyglotism? It’s simple: As mobile operators and web giants try to expand their markets by bringing more people online, we have reached a tipping point where the imbalance of content on the internet has become too stark to avoid.

“A lot of the content online is about very few places and those are the places you might imagine: Western Europe, Japan, Korea, North America,” says Mark Graham, an associate professor who looks at information geographies at the Oxford Internet Institute. “And a lot of the contribution to the internet comes from those very same places.”

The English domination of the web is completely divorced from the language’s presence in the human population. “Just over half (55.8%) of Web content is estimated to be in English despite the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population speak it as a first language, with only 21% estimated to have some level of understanding,” according to GSMA and Mozilla (pdf). “By contrast, some of the world’s most widely spoken languages, such as Arabic or Hindi, account for a relatively small proportion of the Web’s content (0.8% and less than 0.1% respectively).”

My two cents? I think the net of the future will not shift away from English but, rather, offer more local content and much more content in other languages. Just as Facebook, Google and others are evolving new strategies to reach new, untapped markets as their existing customer bases become saturated, the net will evolve as needed to reach everyone on the planet.