2000 was a turning point for a multilingual internet, both for its content and its users. In summer 2000, non-English-speaking users reached 50%. This percentage went on to increase steadily: 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 - with 34.9% non-English- speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians - and 64.2% in March 2004 - with 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians (source: Global Reach). The internet is also a good tool for minority languages, as stated by Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, who teaches computing at the Institute Sabhal Mór Ostaig, located on the Island of Skye, in Scotland. Caoimhín also maintains the college website, which is the main site worldwide with information on Scottish Gaelic, with a bilingual (English, Gaelic) list of European minority languages. He wrote in May 2001: "Students do everything by computer, use Gaelic spell- checking, a Gaelic online terminology database. There are more hits on our website. There is more use of sound. Gaelic radio (both Scottish and Irish) is now available continuously worldwide via the internet. A major project has been the translation of the Opera web-browser into Gaelic - the first software of this size available in Gaelic." = "Language nations" At first, the internet was nearly 100% English. Born in the United States, it spread in North America before taking over the whole planet. Then people from all continents began connecting to the internet and posting webpages in their own languages. In the 1990s, the percentage of English decreased from nearly 100% to 85% (reached in 1997 or 1998, depending on the sources). In 1997, Babel - a joint initiative from Alis Technologies (language translation services) and the Internet Society - ran the first major study relating to distribution of languages on the web. The results were published in June 1997 on a webpage named Web Languages Hit Parade. The main languages were English with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%. In July 1998, according to Global Reach, a company specializing in international online marketing, the fastest growing groups of internet users were non-English-speaking: Spanish-speaking, 22.4%, Japanese-speaking, 12.3%; German-speaking, 14%; and French-speaking, 10% - with 56 million non-English-speaking users. More than 80% of all webpages were still in English, whereas only 6% of the world population spoke English as a native language (16% spoke Spanish).