The system had its origins in the academic and, in particular, scientific community which is the longest connected community of all. English is deeply established among scientists as the international lingua franca and from this beginning, English appears to have extended its domain of use to become the preferred lingua franca for the many new kinds of user who have come online in the 1990s. However, the major growth of the Internet is now in non-English speaking areas, particularly Asia and Latin America. Furthermore, as access to the Internet expands in any country, so the profile of its users changes, as do the functions it serves and the range of languages conveyed across it. Typically, usage focuses initially around the workplace, with the academic community often the first wired, but eventually accounting for a small proportion of users.
Surveys suggest most users at present are male, young and middle class.
As access becomes easier, the demography of the Internet will look more like that of the national population, and the communicative functions served by the Internet will become more diverse. The Internet, from its origins as a tool for international communication between a global academic elite, will serve increasingly local cultural and commercial purposes. Hence, it is sensible to expect that a wider range of languages will be used for Internet communication in the future. The Internet Society has reported its own preliminary findings in a survey of the language of home pages on the Word Wide Web. The main conclusion is that languages other than English are now widely used and that this trend will grow in importance.