There are 18,317 websites in Basque, according to the PuntuEUS Observatory
· 13% of the websites use Basque, a figure that concurs with street use of the language.
· Only 25% of the people who register .EUS domain names are women.
· Websites that use Basque the most are the ones whose domain is .EUS (90% of content in Basque).
The PuntuEUS Observatory has for the second year running analysed the presence of Basque across the Internet. It has also measured the presence of the Internet in the Basque Country quantitatively and qualitatively, and to do so, has assessed three spheres: the situation of the .EUS domain, the Internet in the Basque Country, and the situation of Basque on the Internet. The PuntuEUS Observatory is an initiative of the PuntuEUS Foundation and its aim is to measure the situation enjoyed by Basque on the Internet; the results can be accessed at the website. The analysis is conducted once a year and during a presentation hosted by the Martin Ugalde Culture Park, Josu Waliño, the CEO of the PuntuEUS Foundation, presented the results of the data assessment for 2016.
Situation of the .EUS domain. Now that two years have elapsed since the .EUS domain was made public, it has taken up its place on the Basque-language Internet. All the aims set in 2016 were met and by the end of the year .EUS had 6,302 domain names.
A total of 230,000 domain names are registered in the Basque Country, taking the main domain names (.com, .org, .net, .es, etc.) into consideration. Among them the number of .EUS domains is not very high, but if we bear in mind that only 18,317 of the websites are in Basque, the presence of our domain is significant because one in three of them is .EUS.
In terms of quality, .EUS is the domain that makes the biggest content contribution in the Basque Country. .EUS websites publish a lot of content which averages out at 7,131 website documents, thus making a large contribution to the Internet. The remaining domains (.com, .net, etc.), contribute an average of 1,782 website documents. This is important for Basque, because a large proportion of the content of .EUS websites is posted in Basque.
After analysing the data on the registrations made in the Basque Country, the domain is spread across the Basque Country, but there are significant imbalances between one province and another, while Gipuzkoa is the province with the most. These data display greater similarity with the conclusions of the Sociolinguistic Survey and Map produced by the Government of the Basque Autonomous Community and the Euskararen Erakunde Publikoa (Public Institution for the Basque Language) than with the demographic distribution of the provinces.
As far as the type is concerned, the typology of organisations that register the .EUS domain points to the general and diverse value of the domain. As is usual on the Internet, the main users of the .EUS domain are companies.
The Internet in the Basque Country
As regards the Basque Country’s Internet market as a whole, .COM and .ES are the main domains, and together they account for 75% of the market. However, they both display a downward trend. .COM fell 2% last year, and .ES 9%. The domains fell 7% in the Basque Country as a whole, while .EUS grew 28%.
According to the analysis made by the PuntuEUS Observatory in 2015, the .EUS domain was in 8th position on the market. By the end of 2016 it had managed to improve this position, overtaking the .INFO domain and moving up to 7th position. With a 28% growth rate in 2016, the .EUS managed to maintain its domain growth.
The situation of Basque on the Internet
13% of the Basque Country’s websites use Basque, in other words, 18,317 of the websites in the Basque Country have some content in Basque. This figure concurs with the latest measurement of Street Use of Basque.
The presence of Basque is greater in the .EUS domains because the percentage of websites in this domain whose content is in Basque is 90%. So the .EUS domain can be said to act as the digital “lungs” of the Basque language.
As regards the remaining domains, the presence of Basque on their websites is less than 20% in most cases. The .ORG domain is the one with the most Basque, as 34% of the websites have Basque content, but in the remaining cases the presence of Basque is very low.
Women in the digital environment
This year the Observatory also measured women’s presence on the Internet. The figure is not good: only 25% of the people who register the .EUS domain are women.
The presence of women in the digital environment is low everywhere. According to research published by the European Commission, only 30% of the 7 million people who work in ICTs are women, and in positions of responsibility that percentage is even lower, only 19%.
According to UMAP, which gathers and filters the activity of Basque-speaking twitter users, 33% of Basque tweeters are women. With respect to the ranking of users, 22 women appeared among the first 100 but not a single one among the first 10.