# Exploring the Dominance of the English Language on the Websites of EU Countries
## 6 Conclusions  
The present study has demonstrated explicitly that the English language represents the number one choice for international communication in the European Union through the World Wide Web. More than one quarter of websites belonging to NTLDs of non-English speaking countries, on average, offer their content in the English language. On the other hand, websites of English speaking countries very rarely offer the option for any other language besides English. This clearly indicates that, for both English speaking countries and non-English speaking ones, the use of the English language is viewed as the most efficient way to attain international reach. On top of that, a significant number (almost 10%) of websites from non-English speaking countries prioritize English over their own official language or languages. This further reinforces the status of English as the most prevalent language for international communication in the wider European Union. When studying the reasons that lead to a greater or lesser availability of the English language in websites of non-English speaking EU member states, a statistically significant moderate negative correlation was discovered between both the population and GDP of a member state and the availability of English in its websites. This signifies that, in general, larger countries population-wise and more affluent countries put less effort into providing their website content in English than smaller countries. This correlation reinforces the notion that language is a hard barrier in achieving greater reach. Countries with a smaller number of people speaking their official language need to compensate by putting more effort into providing their content in English, in order to attain the reach that an equivalent website in a larger non-English speaking country or in an English speaking country would have. Besides population and GDP, some characteristics that were identified to influence the prevalence of the English language were: i) a country's position in the EU periphery (in the Balkans, the Baltic states, Scandinavia, and Portugal), ii) an already existing multilingual culture due to more than one official language (in Belgium and Luxemburg), and iii) a close historical connection with British culture (in the case of Cyprus). The fact that, to the best of our knowledge, there are no directly related works, makes it difficult to compare the results of this study to previous research on the field, Yet, it is clear that the quantified information presented in the Results section, as well as the hermeneutical insights elaborated in the Discussion section provide numerical evidence of i) the theoretical approaches regarding national identities in the era of globalization, ii) the discussion about the use of English language as a means of international communication, and iii) the political analysis of the role of national identities in the multinational environment of the EU. Thus, the study is in common perspective with loosely related works along the above-mentioned axes. The main contribution of this study lies in the provision of quantified information regarding the usage of the English language in the websites of EU, obtained from a large-scale data research all over the web of EU member states. In addition, this research paves the way for the exploration of the current status of European integration in quite a different way to the traditional approaches. Instead of opinion polls and theoretical analysis, this study indicates that more accurate results may be achieved by the use of unintentionally and freely provided data on the web. Pushing this research further, it would be interesting to examine the language situation of the.eu top-level domain which was launched in 2005. Although not explicitly an NTLD, it acts as a representation for the EU. Its popularity in different member states or the popularity of different languages in websites using that particular TLD might lead to some interesting conclusions.