# Exploring the Dominance of the English Language on the Websites of EU Countries
## 5 Discussion
### National and Regional Factors  
As mentioned above, cultural and geographical factors, besides a country's population, may play a role in the influence of the English language in its websites. Having established a strong correlation between website availability in English and English as a primary language for a website, it is safe to assume that whatever conclusions we draw from differences in specific member states will play a strong role in both these metrics. Looking at individual countries, we note that Cyprus appears to be an outlier, having 83.94% of websites available in English and 67.6% using it as a primary language. This occurs despite the fact that English is not an official language in Cyprus. This can be attributed mostly to cultural factors. Cyprus was a British colony up until 1960, so both the cultural and the linguistic influence of the British Empire are strong. Additionally, international banking and tourism are both prevalent in Cyprus, creating an environment that encourages the use of English as a primary language in websites. This, combined with the small population of Cyprus and its position in the periphery of the EU, create the conditions which make the English language more popular than even the island nations' official languages. Taking a country's geographical location in relation to the EU more into consideration, we notice the highest percentages of English availability and prevalence are noticed in peripheral countries. Countries of the Balkan peninsula, countries of the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia, as well as Portugal all have higher percentages than the EU average both in English availability and in English as a primary language. This might indicate an effort from peripheral countries to achieve greater integration with both European culture and the common marketplace. Most peripheral countries tend to also be later additions to the EU roster, which reinforces their need to put more effort into internationalization and EU integration. On a different note, Belgium and Luxemburg also seem to display a high influence of the English language. Both these countries have more than one non-English official language. This creates a multilingual culture and somewhat diminishes the sense of national pride that might be otherwise connected with language. Additionally, the cost of integrating a secondary language into a website is lower if the website already has support for more than one language. The multilanguage functionality is there and all that remains is the addition of the translated content. In addition to observing each country individually, some of the factors that influence the availability or status of the English language in the websites of non-English speaking EU member states might be \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
\begin{tabular}{c} 0.921 ** \\ 1 \\ 25 \\ 1 \\ 25 \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}  
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).  
\end{table} 
Table 7: [PERSON]’s correlation coefficient (English as primary language—availability in English). attributed to the wider region. Cultural relations often arise from common history or the geo-political status of a wider region, all of which may play a part in the adoption of English in the World Wide Web. In order to better understand regional factors, we separated the 25 non-English speaking countries of the EU to four different regions based on how they are defined by the European Vocabulararies [46] of the Publications Office of the European Union, which is an \"interinstitutional office whose task is to publish the publications of the institutions of the European Union\" [47]. Table 8 shows how the countries were divided. The average percentage of websites that have English available and the average percentage of websites that have English as their primary language in each different region are shown in Figures 12 and 13, respectively. Figure 12: English Language Availability in Websites of Non-English speaking EU Member states by region.