# Exploring the Dominance of the English Language on the Websites of EU Countries
## 5 Discussion  
### English Language Availability in Websites  
One of the major cornerstones of international communication is a common language. In an effort to increase their respective reach, websites within the European Union often make themselves available in more than one language. Browsing through the results of the previous section, it is made abundantly clear that websites of non-English speaking member states are keener to provide their users with alternative languages. It is made clear by Figure 4 of the results section that there is a discrepancy between English and non-English speaking countries. The percentage of monolingual sites drops from 98.01% in English speaking countries to 79.05% in non-English speaking countries. The major force behind that discrepancy is the effort to make non-English websites available in English as we will see further down. Additionally, there is a notable difference between bilingual and multilingual websites. Making a website available in more than one language requires a lot of work, so having three or more languages is a costly endeavor. If the main purpose is increasing a website's reach and that can be accomplished by using a dominant language, this makes the bilingual option much more attractive to website owners. If we take into account the relative percentage of websites available in English in non-English speaking member states, as presented in Figure 5, coupled with the fact that English speaking countries not only have a very low number of bilingual or multilingual websites, but also have a very high percentage of websites available in English, we come to the conclusion that there is a consensus that the English language is considered enough to cover the need of EU websites for international reach. Figure 11: English as a Primary Language in Websites of Non-English Speaking EU Member States. Having the English language available on a website can be achieved by adding it on top of each country's established official language and that can increase costs. In some cases, especially when international or pan-European reach is the main objective of the website, the official language is abandoned, and the website is presented only in English. Additionally, when the investment for providing multiple languages is made, occasionally, other languages get priority over English. As seen in Figure 6a, the choice to forgo the official language of a country in order to accommodate English is not very popular, although it is still significant. On the other hand, when multiple languages are supported, it is very rare for English to be omitted as seen in Figure 6b,c. This observation reinforces our earlier assumption that the availability of multiple languages is driven primarily by the need to include English in order to increase reach. The most popular choice that accommodates both the use of English for greater reach and the relatively low cost of adding a singular secondary language makes the model of a bilingual website that supports English the most popular model. This comes in line with the findings of [PERSON] and [PERSON] [25] which also demonstrated the popularity of bilingual content with one of the two languages being English (in their case only in relevance to abstracts of scientific publications). On average 17.08% of all websites are bilingual websites that support the English language. This percentage comes really close to the total of bilingual websites and represents the largest part of all websites that are available in English. Studying both Figures 7 and 8, we can see that the lowest percentages of English availability come from the largest EU member states (Germany, France, and Poland). Websites of smaller countries seem much more eager to provide their content in the English language. More than 35% of websites in Latvia, Belgium, Romania, Greece, Luxemburg, and Cyprus have English as their primary language.