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TOASTYSTATS: what languages are AO3 and FFN fanworks written in?
A lovely reader a while ago asked about different languages on AO3, and how they popular languages are changing over time. I hope to dig into that in more detail eventually, but for the moment, I started by looking at the current language distribution on two of the major fanfiction archives.
There were several big surprises for me in this data:
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Everything is English. English is a more overwhelming majority on both platforms than I'd realized -- 89% of FFN works and 95% of AO3 works are in English. I know a lot of authors with other native languages write fanfic in English (for which I'm both grateful and impressed), but I am guessing there are also a bunch of fanworks that are written in other languages that don't end up on these particular archives. I find the overwhelming monolinguisticness of these archives slightly disheartening, though.
- FFN is more diverse than AO3. I for some reason expected AO3 to have a lower percentage of English than FFN, maybe in part because AO3 supports some languages that FFN does not (including Klingon, Elvish, and Thermian). But just because there are a number of languages that are only supported on AO3 doesn't mean that there are lots of fanworks in all those languages (in fact, it turns out that not many people choose to write in Klingon, etc. :) ).
- русский! Spanish is the second most popular language on FFN -- but not AO3. Russian is nearly twice as common as Spanish on AO3 (24.7K vs 13.6K fanworks). Just generally, I find the different language distributions very interesting. There's also a more complete list of language frequencies on both archives, if you're interested.
This makes me wonder where most non-English fanworks live. I know when one of my fics was translated into Mandarin, the translator posted it on http://www.movietvslash.com/ (a password-protected forum). But I don't have a good sense of how big that site is, or where other works are hosted. I'd love to learn more, though!
Can any international readers who are familiar with primarily non-English fanfic archives/sites share information about those? Any info about what language(s) the works are in, how many fanworks are hosted, which fandoms are popular -- and anything else you find to be an interesting contrast to AO3 or FFN? Feel free to send me an ask, a submission, or an email (destinationtoast at gmail). Thanks in advance!
Also, any other questions or thoughts inspired by these graphs/stats are welcome, as always.
Raw data for these graphs -- and much more info -- is available here; I'll be posting more graphs from the spreadsheet later. And the AO3 language list has up-to-date counts of fanworks for each language on the archive. (The FFN language data was tricker to obtain, but if you're interested, I can help you access it.)