Should I Publish in English?

Some statistics can help you decide.

Publishing in English may be difficult, for non-native speakers. Also, English speakers may have reasons for publishing in local languages.

It seemed to me that English was the obvious choice for publishing when locale content is not strictly involved. Was I wrong? Seen the effort for translation, and the difficulty for me to write directly in English, I’d prefer to check better with some statistics too.

I supposed — by a rough estimation — that English was more or less 20 times more diffused than my own language, Italian. Also, it’s an increasingly popular second/third language. Was I right? What about the other main languages? Should diffusion be the main criteria for deciding the language of publication?

The linguistic demography

I’ll take into consideration the main 10 world languages, plus Italian as an example of a minor language. I assumed Wikipedia data are reliable enough for the purpose (based on the 2019 edition of Ethnologue).

Estimates on the top languages in terms of native speakers are:

• Mandarin Chinese (921 million)
• Spanish (463 million)
• English (370 million)