In fact, there are a number of companies that support more than 30 languages that did not make the top 25.

So, no, number of languages alone doesn’t make a site “global.” But you certainly can’t be global without them.

Like I said, languages are a means to an end.

It would also depend on the company – if you have a product that could truly be sold to lots of people, all over the world who go to the web and use the info then it makes sense to have info in all those languages, and if you don’t have a customer base that cares then you could be truly global with just a handful of languages. Thus, the more important issue is what is important to your customers.

If you are Nivea it may be 35 and if you are Louise Vuitton it may be just 10 to reach the 90% of your customers who really care that you have content in their language.

I also question the value of the rankings of the top 25 — having Google produce a few pages in 125 languages, does it really make them more global? Do depth and real engagement not matter? The Google engine produces suspect results in a lot of those languages. In fact in the most active markets in Asia: China, Japan, Korea, Google is not the preferred search engine mostly, because they don’t do a very good job of searching content in the local language. So what does it really matter if they have a few pages in the local languages?

I think also it is very likely that as we get past the top 30 or 50 languages, mobile content starts to matter more and more. There are 1.7B people on the web but there are over 4.5B already with mobile access.

So maybe if you really want global coverage you should be thinking about how to get content out differently.