Which languages should you add to your website first?
A data-driven framework for founders, marketers, and PMs choosing which languages to prioritize when going multilingual for the first time.
The right question: internet users, not world population
Most people start this decision by Googling “most spoken languages in the world” and end up with a list dominated by Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish. But world population is the wrong lens for a product decision. What matters is: how many people in this language actively use the internet and buy things online?
A language spoken by 500M people with 30% internet penetration and low e-commerce spend is a worse first bet than a language spoken by 100M people with 90% internet penetration and high GDP per capita. The decision framework has three layers:
- 1Market size: Number of active internet users in that language, not total speakers.
- 2Purchasing power: Average income and willingness to pay for software or services in that market.
- 3Your own signal: Where is your existing traffic and organic search coming from right now?
The top 5 languages to consider first
These five languages cover the largest addressable markets for most web products. They are not ranked by total speaker count — they are ranked by a combination of internet market size, purchasing power, and how commonly they appear as the highest- ROI first expansion language for English-origin products.
🇪🇸 Spanish
500M+ speakersThe single best first expansion for most English-language products. It unlocks the entire Latin American market (Brazil aside) plus 41M+ US Hispanic internet users — a market larger than many European countries. Spanish-speaking countries show strong e-commerce growth, and the search volume in Spanish for most software categories is enormous.
🇫🇷 French
300M+ speakersFrench is spoken across Western Europe, Canada (Québec), and significant parts of sub-Saharan Africa — one of the fastest-growing internet markets in the world. France alone has a GDP per capita that makes it a valuable market, and French-speaking African countries represent a young, digitally-native population with rising purchasing power.
🇩🇪 German
~100M speakersGerman speakers are fewer in number but punch far above their weight in purchasing power. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland consistently rank among the highest GDP-per-capita markets in Europe. German consumers also have a strong preference for local-language products — conversion rates on German-language sites are measurably higher for German users than on English equivalents.
🇧🇷 Portuguese
250M+ speakersBrazil is the 9th largest internet market in the world by number of users — larger than Germany, France, or the UK. Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese are different enough to warrant attention (vocabulary, spelling, and tone differ), but for most software products a single Brazilian Portuguese localization serves both markets adequately as a starting point.
🇯🇵 Japanese
~125M speakersJapan has one of the highest e-commerce spend-per-capita figures globally. Japanese users show a strong cultural preference for Japanese-language interfaces — English-only products face a significant trust and conversion barrier that translated products do not. Japanese is a larger translation investment (different script, different UX conventions), but the market's willingness to pay makes it worthwhile.
When to add Arabic
Arabic is the 4th most used language on the internet, with strong internet penetration and high purchasing power in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait rank among the world's highest GDP-per- capita markets. If your analytics show meaningful traffic from those regions, Arabic should move up your priority list quickly.
The main technical consideration is right-to-left (RTL) layout. Arabic is written right-to-left, which means your site layout — not just the text — needs to mirror. This historically required significant engineering work. Lingvit handles RTL automatically: when a visitor switches to Arabic, the widget applies dir="rtl" to the document and the layout flips without any custom CSS from you. Read the full guide in RTL website support.
When NOT to follow pure speaker count
Speaker count alone is a misleading signal. Two important exceptions:
Hindi — 600M+ speakers, low urgency for most products
India has an enormous internet user base, but English penetration among Indian internet users — particularly those likely to buy B2B software or SaaS — is significantly higher than in most countries. Urban, tech-literate Indian users are very comfortable with English-language products. Hindi localization makes sense for consumer products targeting tier-2 and tier-3 cities, but it is not a top-five priority for most software products.
Russian — large market, geopolitical complexity
Russian is spoken across a wide geography including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Asian countries. The Russian internet market was historically large and tech-savvy. Current geopolitical conditions have made this market significantly more complex — payment processing, regulatory exposure, and market access all require careful evaluation before investing in Russian localization. It may still make sense for certain verticals, but go in with eyes open.
How to use your own analytics to decide
General market data tells you where the opportunity exists. Your own analytics tell you where you already have traction. The combination is what drives the best decision.
Google Search Console
Open Search Console and go to Performance → Search results. Filter by country. Look for countries where you have significant impressions but low click-through rate. This is a strong signal that people are searching for what you offer, but your page isn't winning because it's in the wrong language. Those countries are your highest-ROI translation targets.
Your sign-up or lead data
Check where your existing sign-ups or leads come from. If 8% of your sign-ups already come from Germany without any German-language content, imagine the conversion rate lift when you add it. Existing traction without localization is the strongest possible signal.
Competitor research
Check which languages your direct competitors have translated into. If three of your top competitors have a French version and you don't, you are leaving French organic traffic to them by default.
The quick-win playbook
If you want a simple, actionable starting point:
- 1Open Google Search Console. Identify the top non-English country by impressions.
- 2Cross-reference with your sign-up data. If the same country appears — that is your first language.
- 3If no single country dominates, use the general priority list above: Spanish first, French second, German third.
- 4Launch that one language, measure the impact over 60–90 days, then decide on the next.
This approach avoids the trap of trying to support ten languages at once and delivering mediocre quality across all of them. One language done well beats five languages done poorly.