The Internet's Lingua Franca: We Classified 1.74 Million Websites Across 54 Country Domains — 64% Are in English
We used LLMSE to classify the language of 1.74 million websites across 54 country-code TLDs and cross-referenced findings with the DomainsProject dataset. 64% are in English — but the number masks five distinct mechanisms driving English prevalence, from colonial inheritance (.in at 95.9%) to outright resistance (.jp at 7.0%). The internet's default language is not a choice most countries made. It is a condition most countries inherited, adopted for commerce, or actively fight.