Language practices on commercial websites have a considerable impact on the potential multilingualism of the Internet. This paper reports on a study of the Internet language practices of ten global consumer brands on their country‐, region‐, and language‐specific websites, 548 in total. The results are analysed using de Swaan's (2001) notion of a world language system. The study shows that while English performs a limited ‘hypercentral’ function on commercial websites, its prevalence is outweighed by other languages. In addition, while the international lingua franca functions of a number of de Swaan's ‘supercentral’ languages are being maintained through commercial websites (e.g. Spanish, French, Arabic), others are being downgraded (e.g. Hindi, Malay, Swahili). Finally, the main challenge to the hypercentrality of English appears to come, not from another supercentral language, but from smaller ‘central’ languages, which are increasingly appearing in the profile of websites offered by global brands.
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