This is my opening blog entry here what I would like to celebrate with a special topic. I will sketch you a picture about the popularity of Joomla! from the viewpoint of the languages.

The internationalization is a hinge of the Joomla! 1.5.x release. The user interface of Joomla! 1.5.x is available in dozens of translations. You can obtain them from various resources, but if you are looking for a particular language, your first step should be to visit the Translations Project at JoomlaCode.

We have learnt that the search engines are our friends if we need something from the web. I read some blogs utilizing Google's services, I will do the same now with the global Google Search. Power users surely often turn to the Advanced Search feature. You will find a Language dropdown in this screen. Currently 43 languages can be selected to filter the results of the chosen language. I played it over with the keyword 'joomla' entered in the this exact wording or phrase field.

At the time of writing these lines about 92,5 million entries are indexed by Google. The No. 1 is English of course with 53,1 million hits. The rest is interesting for us: Estonian (12.7 million hits) leaves German (10.5 million hits). French (6.19 million hits), Spanish (5.57 million hits) and Italian (5.42 million hits) are creating the middle of the first pack. Russian (3.86 million hits), Dutch (3.82 million hits), Portuguese (3.32 million hits) and Hungarian (3.28 million hits) are closing the leading group. Turkish tail away a little (3.13 million hits), followed by Polish (2.68 million hits). Then Thai (2.16 million hits), Vietnamese (2.08 million hits), Japanese (1.70 million hits) and simplified Chinese (1.15 million hits) appear from the Far East.

This contention never ends – anyone can fasten, anytime.

The honest truth is that the above numbers are unauthenticated details, they can be used with preliminary only. However, good for an estimated volume of Joomla! hits for a language.

A language can be spoken outside its country, so let's turn back to the Advanced Search tool of Google. Expand the Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more link. In the Region dropdown list you can select your country, and the results for that country will be listed. Combining the Language and Region options you can learn very interesting details. For instance, how many results are available for a specific language in the selected country and so on.

These numbers denote the efforts of the translators and the local community members, who devoted their time to contribute to this fabulous project. The translation is a very special and valuable way of being part of this wonder.