http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/intro.png

# Intro

When I was recently scrolling through Trending page I found something interesting - among top 100 articles there were 15 of them written in Korean! Even more interesting thing - it was the only trending language other than English. Does it mean Koreans are the largest non-English community on Steemit?

And since I’m a member of *Polish Team*, [which is trying to do something in Polish community](https://steemit.com/growth-ideas/@lukmarcus/growth-idea-growth-project-introducing-steem-and-steemit-to-polish-community-translation-of-all-new-steemitblog-articles), I was wondering how it looks in other languages.

There is only one major problem, how to find non-English communities? There are no portals, no main pages and you can’t really browse anything on Steemit. The one and only method (at least for me) is to simply search for tags. Every post needs a tag and you can use up to 5 of them. Let’s put it in this way - if you wrote something in language other than English and you didn’t use it in tags than sorry - you are not a part of community. How anyone should ever find your post? Right now that’s impossible.

# Choosing languages

As I said: tags. The only way. Let the hunt begins.

At first I tried searching for some random languages but I soon found out it won’t be as easy as I thought. I needed a list of languages to focus on one by one. So I decided to help myself with Google and that’s how I found [List of languages by total number of speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers) (based on https://www.ethnologue.com/). In that moment I had no better idea so it was as good as it was.

So you all know there are no rules in tagging posts. You can do whatever you want, so different language tags don’t look the same. My discovery, Korean posts, are under [*kr*](https://steemit.com/created/kr). On the other hand my native language, Polish, is under [*polish*](https://steemit.com/created/polish), not [*pl*](https://steemit.com/created/pl) or [*polski*](https://steemit.com/created/polski) (Polish name of our language).

I needed to create some kind of scheme for this to work. For each language on my list I had to check tags for:
- [ISO 639-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1)
- [ISO 639-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-2)
- [ISO 639-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3)
- English name of language
- foreign name of language
- English name of country
- foreign name of country
- other ideas (like Korean [*kr*](https://steemit.com/created/kr) which is none of above)

# Languages by total number of speakers

That’s how first list was created.

Rank | Language | Primary tag
- | - | -
1 | Mandarin Chinese | [*cn*](https://steemit.com/created/cn)
2 | English | n/a
3 | Hindi / Urdu | none exist?
4 | Spanish | [*spanish*](https://steemit.com/created/spanish)
5 | Arabic | possibly [*arabic*](https://steemit.com/created/arabic) (last post: 1st September 2016)
6 | Malay | none exist?
7 | Russian | [*ru*](https://steemit.com/created/ru)
8 | French | [*fr*](https://steemit.com/created/fr)
9 | Portuguese | [*portugal*](https://steemit.com/created/portugal)
10 | Bengali | possibly [*bengali*](https://steemit.com/created/bengali) (last post: 9th January 2017)
11 | German | [*deutsch*](https://steemit.com/created/deutsch)
12 | Hausa | none exist?
13 | Punjabi | none exist?
14 | Japanese | [*japanese*](https://steemit.com/created/japanese)
15 | Persian | [*persian*](https://steemit.com/created/persian) (last post: 5th March 2017)
16 | Swahili | none exist?
17 | Telugu | none exist?
18 | Italian | [*italiano*](https://steemit.com/created/italiano) (last post: 18th February 2017)
19 | Turkish | [*tr*](https://steemit.com/created/tr)
20 | Javanese | none exist?
... | ... | ...
22 | Korean | [*kr*](https://steemit.com/created/kr)
... | ... | ...
? | Polish | [*polish*](https://steemit.com/created/polish)

As you can see, that idea was a dead end. Almost half of languages from list don’t exist on Steemit or maybe they are so hidden that I couldn’t find them. And if the second option is the truth then let’s simply assume they don’t exist.

Also there are languages that maybe you didn’t even know that are on the world. Come on, don’t be afraid to admit it. Ask yourself a question - how many of Punjabi people have time, technology and know Steemit to write a post on it? Amount of speakers is not linked with number of internet users and that’s the real problem.

I had to rethink it all.

# Languages used on the Internet

I knew it wasn’t the end and I didn’t gave up yet. There must be a better list of languages used in internet. And there is!

24th March 2015 [W3Techs](https://w3techs.com/) created what I was looking for. [List of Languages used on the Internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet).

New table looked much better:

Rank | Language | Primary tag
- | - |  -
1 | English | n/a
2 | Russian | [*ru*](https://steemit.com/created/ru)
3 | Japanese | [*japanese*](https://steemit.com/created/japanese)
4 | German | [*deutsch*](https://steemit.com/created/deutsch)
5 | Spanish | [*spanish*](https://steemit.com/created/spanish)
6 | French | [*fr*](https://steemit.com/created/fr)
7 | Portuguese | [*portugal*](https://steemit.com/created/portugal)
8 | Italian | [*italiano*](https://steemit.com/created/italiano) (last post: 18th February 2017)
9 | Chinese | [*cn*](https://steemit.com/created/cn)
10 | Polish | [*polish*](https://steemit.com/created/polish)
11 | Turkish | [*tr*](https://steemit.com/created/tr)
12 | Persian | [*persian*](https://steemit.com/created/persian) (last post: 5th March 2017)
13 | Dutch | [*nl*](https://steemit.com/created/nl) (last post: 26th March 2017)
14 | Korean | [*kr*](https://steemit.com/created/kr)
15 | Czech | possibly [*czech*](https://steemit.com/created/czech) (last post: 8th November 2016)
16 | Arabic | possibly [*arabic*](https://steemit.com/created/arabic) (last post: 1st September 2016)
17 | Vietnamese | [*vietnamese*](https://steemit.com/created/vietnamese)
18 | Indonesian | [*indonesian*](https://steemit.com/created/indonesian)
19 | Greek | [*greece*](https://steemit.com/created/greece) (last post: 24th March 2017)
20 | Swedish | possibly [*svenska*](https://steemit.com/created/svenska) (last post: 1st August 2016)

# 1 week of posting

For my “experiment” I had to choose a period of time. I knew that the longer time I choose the better results I will get but with this amount of searching for data I decided to limit it only to one week. From Monday to Sunday, from 17th April to 23rd April.

I was counting only posts written in foreign language or in two languages. All English posts were not included in my statistics.

# Only 6... and the rest

My next step was to limit languages to those with at least 10 posts in a week. I was really surprised when I was left with only 6 options: Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

It was time to answer most important question: what’s the largest non-English community?

But before... let’s look at the rest of 13 languages (without English).

Rank | Language | Posts | Primary tag
- | - | - | -
7 | French | 7 | [*fr*](https://steemit.com/created/fr)
8 | Turkish | 7 | [*tr*](https://steemit.com/created/tr)
9 | Polish | 6 | [*polish*](https://steemit.com/created/polish)
10 | Portuguese | 1 | [*portugal*](https://steemit.com/created/portugal)
11 | Vietnamese | 1 | [*vietnamese*](https://steemit.com/created/vietnamese)
12 | Indonesian | 1 | [*indonesian*](https://steemit.com/created/indonesian)
13 | Dutch | 0 | [*nl*](https://steemit.com/created/nl) (last post: 26th March 2017)
14 | Greek | 0 | [*greece*](https://steemit.com/created/greece) (last post: 24th March 2017)
15 | Persian | 0 | [*persian*](https://steemit.com/created/persian) (last post: 5th March 2017)
16 | Italian | 0 | [*italiano*](https://steemit.com/created/italiano) (last post: 18th February 2017)
17 | Czech | 0 | possibly [*czech*](https://steemit.com/created/czech) (last post: 8th November 2016)
18 | Arabic | 0 | possibly [*arabic*](https://steemit.com/created/arabic) (last post: 1st September 2016)
19 | Swedish | 0 | possibly [*svenska*](https://steemit.com/created/svenska) (last post: 1st August 2016)

# Graphs & Statistics

My posts must have graphs or statistics. It’s time to show them. In the beginning we will see how many posts were published day by day.

### 17th April (Monday)
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_17.png
### 18th April (Tuesday)
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_18.png
### 19th April (Wednesday)
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_19.png
### 20th April (Thursday)
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_20.png
### 21st April (Friday)
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_21.png
### 22nd April (Saturday)
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_22.png
### 23rd April (Sunday)
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_23.png
### Average per day
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_average.png

# All posts

Finally we get to the point where I’m going to tell you how many posts were created by top 6 non-English communities. Here’s the graph:
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/posts_all.png

So does it mean this shows everything and we have the winner? What’s the largest non-English community on Steemit? Not so fast...

# But... Users?

Posts are really important, that’s the real content. But it’s not the only criteria to answer our question. Why? Because users really matter. To be precise: number of users, who write all those posts. There can be for example only 3 users with 20 posts a day. Is that a big community? Of course not! So let’s be sure and just check this statistics.

### Posting users
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/users_all.png

When we know the amount of posts and number of users, we can determine average posts per user. This time smaller results are better.

### Average posts per user
http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/users_posts.png

# THE Answer
With all data, statistics and graphs it’s time for conclusion. Big community needs not only a lot of posts but also a lot of users to produce content. More users equal different topics and it attracts even more people. And that’s a good way to create the largest non-English community.

In my opinion bronze medal and third place on the podium goes to... German with [*deutsch*](https://steemit.com/created/deutsch)!

Second place with silver medal takes... Korean with [*kr*](https://steemit.com/created/kr)!

And finally golden medal and first place for largest non-English community on Steemit goes to... Spanish with, hmmm, [*spanish*](https://steemit.com/created/spanish). Why? Answer is simple - everything is just bigger and better than in other languages.

Place | Language | Tag | Posts | Avg posts per day| Users | Avg posts per user
- | - | - | - | - | - | -
6 | Japanese | [*japanese*](https://steemit.com/created/japanese) | 21 | 3,00 | 6 | 3,50
5 | Russian | [*ru*](https://steemit.com/created/ru) | 19 | 2,71 | 9 | 2,11
4 | Chinese | [*cn*](https://steemit.com/created/cn) | 41 | 5,86 | 12 | 3,42
3 | German | [*deutsch*](https://steemit.com/created/deutsch) | 144 | 20,57 | 41 | 3,51
2 | Korean | [*kr*](https://steemit.com/created/kr) | 240 | 34,29 | 49 | 4,90
1 | Spanish | [*spanish*](https://steemit.com/created/spanish) | 249 | 35,57 | 80 | 3,11

http://mark6.vot.pl/non-english/podium.png

Now you can tell me, what have I done wrong? :)