Surfing the shabaka
The world’s fifth-most-spoken language lags online
THE Arab world from Rabat to Baghdad likes to surf. The proportion of Arabs online grew 30-fold between 2000 and 2012. Shaking off their stuffy image, 41% of Saudi internet users are on Twitter, the highest rate in the world. But Arabic speakers have far less content in their native language than others do. By some estimates, fewer than 1% of all web pages are in Arabic.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Surfing the shabaka”
From the April 12th 2014 edition
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