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, 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 (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. On the other hand my native language, Polish, is under polish, not pl or 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
• ISO 639-2
• ISO 639-3
• English name of language
• foreign name of language
• English name of country
• foreign name of country
• other ideas (like Korean 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
2	English	n/a
3	Hindi / Urdu	none exist?
4	Spanish	spanish
5	Arabic	possibly arabic (last post: 1st September 2016)
6	Malay	none exist?
7	Russian	ru
8	French	fr
9	Portuguese	portugal
10	Bengali	possibly bengali (last post: 9th January 2017)
11	German	deutsch
12	Hausa	none exist?
13	Punjabi	none exist?
14	Japanese	japanese
15	Persian	persian (last post: 5th March 2017)
16	Swahili	none exist?
17	Telugu	none exist?
18	Italian	italiano (last post: 18th February 2017)
19	Turkish	tr
20	Javanese	none exist?
...	...	...
22	Korean	kr
...	...	...
?	Polish	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 created what I was looking for. List of Languages used on the Internet.

New table looked much better:

Rank	Language	Primary tag
1	English	n/a
2	Russian	ru
3	Japanese	japanese
4	German	deutsch
5	Spanish	spanish
6	French	fr
7	Portuguese	portugal
8	Italian	italiano (last post: 18th February 2017)
9	Chinese	cn
10	Polish	polish
11	Turkish	tr
12	Persian	persian (last post: 5th March 2017)
13	Dutch	nl (last post: 26th March 2017)
14	Korean	kr
15	Czech	possibly czech (last post: 8th November 2016)
16	Arabic	possibly arabic (last post: 1st September 2016)
17	Vietnamese	vietnamese
18	Indonesian	indonesian
19	Greek	greece (last post: 24th March 2017)
20	Swedish	possibly 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
8	Turkish	7	tr
9	Polish	6	polish
10	Portuguese	1	portugal
11	Vietnamese	1	vietnamese
12	Indonesian	1	indonesian
13	Dutch	0	nl (last post: 26th March 2017)
14	Greek	0	greece (last post: 24th March 2017)
15	Persian	0	persian (last post: 5th March 2017)
16	Italian	0	italiano (last post: 18th February 2017)
17	Czech	0	possibly czech (last post: 8th November 2016)
18	Arabic	0	possibly arabic (last post: 1st September 2016)
19	Swedish	0	possibly 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)

18th April (Tuesday)

19th April (Wednesday)

20th April (Thursday)

21st April (Friday)

22nd April (Saturday)

23rd April (Sunday)

Average per day

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:

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

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

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!

Second place with silver medal takes... Korean with kr!

And finally golden medal and first place for largest non-English community on Steemit goes to... Spanish with, hmmm, 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	21	3,00	6	3,50
5	Russian	ru	19	2,71	9	2,11
4	Chinese	cn	41	5,86	12	3,42
3	German	deutsch	144	20,57	41	3,51
2	Korean	kr	240	34,29	49	4,90
1	Spanish	spanish	249	35,57	80	3,11

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