According to a report released by the international website Socialbakers, Portuguese is the third most used language on Facebook, the largest social network in the world. English tops the Socialbakers’ top ten list of most used languages followed by Spanish, which comes second.

The other languages in the list are French, Indonesian, Turkish, German, Italian, Arabic and Chinese, which occupies the 10th position with 20.1 million users.

Portuguese and Arabic are the two languages that have grown faster on Facebook, the site revealed. The social network is currently available in over 70 languages

Portuguese has grown significantly on Facebook, due to an increase in Brazilian users, with Brazil ranking second in the list of nations with most Facebook users, after the United States.

Brazil has increased its Facebook base by 13 million users, only in the past six months, which caused the Portuguese language to grow by eight times since May 2010. In November 2012, the number of Portuguese speaking Facebook users had increased to 58.5 million.

Brazil has the fifth-largest population in the world, and ranks among the top countries in Internet usage: in 2011, there were more than 80 million internet users, which is almost half of the country’s population.

As Facebook has continued to grow throughout the world, besides Brazil, the social network is also growing fast in countries such as India, Mexico, Indonesia and regions in Africa.

Portuguese is third most spoken European language in the world after English and Spanish, and the sixth most spoken language worldwide. It is the mother tongue of about 200 million people, chiefly in Portugal including the Azores and Madeira islands in the Atlantic (11 million speakers); in Brazil (184 million speakers); and in Portugal’s former overseas provinces in Africa and Asia (about 5 million speakers).

Portuguese is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe.

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