Over 70% of Bulgarians use a foreign language when surfing the Internet, while a total of 26% visit only websites in Bulgarian, showed a Eurobarometer survey.

The majority of Bulgarians use English (47%), Russian (5%) and German (4%) as foreign languages.

According to the poll, people use the Internet to find information, to read, to watch the news or to communicate with friends and colleagues.

The survey also shows that, although 90% of Internet surfers in the EU prefer to access websites in their own language, 55% at least occasionally use a language other than their native one when online.

When shopping online, people prefer to use their native language. A mere 18% of EU Internet users regularly buy from foreign-language websites, while 42% never buy products from websites in non-native languages.

The least frequent online use of foreign languages is reported by Internet users in Great Britain (15%), with the most frequent foreign language users coming from Malta, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Greece (over 90%).

A considerable 44% of the polled believe that they are missing interesting information because web pages are not in a language that they understand. This is the case with over half of the Romanians, Bulgarians, Cypriots, Spaniards and Greeks.

Nine out of ten polled want all web pages created in their countries to be in the official national language, with the highest percentage in the category being that of Bulgarians (98%). Despite that, nearly eight in ten Europeans believe that web pages must have versions in other languages.

The survey confirms that English is the most commonly used language when it comes to reading and watching content on the Internet in a different language than one's own: 48% of Internet users in the EU use English at least occasionally, while only 4-6% of them use Spanish, German or French.

If the information is not accessible in their language, over 90% of the respondents from Malta and Cyprus use English. The same applies to only 35% of the Italians, 45% of Latvians, 47% of Romanians and 50% of French.

In Great Britain and in Ireland, where only few of the Internet users say they use foreign languages online, French is the most typical language for reading and watching content on the Internet ( 9% and 7%, respectively).

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