The languages people transcribe most
English is 37% of transcribed audio; Spanish is next at 15%. 70 languages across 2,196 hours of real recordings.
The short answer
English is 37% of the audio hours people transcribe on WhipScribe; then Spanish 15%, Persian 7%, Portuguese 6%. 70 languages appeared in 90 days, 15 of them in 20 recordings or more.
Production record, 28 July 2026 to 25 October 2026. Quote with the date.
Languages by audio hours
| Language | Recordings | Audio hours | Share of hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | 984 | 816 | 37.1% |
| Spanish | 171 | 319 | 14.5% |
| Persian | 279 | 154 | 7.0% |
| Portuguese | 75 | 138 | 6.3% |
| Tagalog / Filipino | 179 | 99 | 4.5% |
| Hindi | 69 | 96 | 4.4% |
| Russian | 68 | 64 | 2.9% |
| French | 63 | 60 | 2.7% |
| Chinese | 58 | 53 | 2.4% |
| German | 29 | 32 | 1.5% |
| Japanese | 31 | 26 | 1.2% |
| Catalan | 25 | 21 | 1.0% |
| Arabic | 20 | 16 | 0.7% |
| Tamil | 37 | 10 | 0.4% |
| Bengali | 21 | 5 | 0.2% |
| 55 other languages | – | 287 | 13.1% |
2,478 recordings with a detected language, 2,196 hours. Only languages with at least 20 recordings from 5 accounts are named; the other 55 are grouped.
Hours and files tell different stories
By number of files the order is English, Persian, Tagalog / Filipino, Spanish, Portuguese. The average recording length differs a lot by language: Spanish 1.9 h, Portuguese 1.8 h, Hindi 83 min, French 57 min, Russian 56 min, English 50 min, Tagalog / Filipino 33 min, Persian 33 min. That is why a language can rank higher by hours than by files, or the other way round.
Every recording is transcribed in its own language and the language is detected automatically, so these are the languages people actually speak in their files, not the language of the website they used.
Method
Source: the WhipScribe production job record, every job created from 28 July 2026 to 25 October 2026 (90 days, UTC). 7,417 jobs were created; 1,856 were removed as internal, test or direct API traffic (a few integrations submit in batches and would weigh one account like hundreds), and each account counts for at most its first 20 jobs (262 jobs over that cap left out). That leaves 5,299 jobs from 4,107 accounts, 3,469 of them finished recordings of a minute or more. Language is the code the speech recogniser detected for each finished recording. 205 recordings that were less than 20% speech and 786 with no stored language code are not ranked.
Privacy: aggregates only. Every row shown stands on at least 20 jobs from at least 5 different accounts; smaller groups are folded into "other" or left out. No name, e-mail, file name, link or transcript text was read into the figures. Computed by scripts/research_production.py, measured 26 October 2026.
Questions
What languages do people transcribe most?
English is 37% of the audio hours people transcribe on WhipScribe; then Spanish 15%, Persian 7%, Portuguese 6%. 70 languages appeared in 90 days, 15 of them in 20 recordings or more.
How is the language decided?
The speech recogniser detects it from the audio of each finished recording. Recordings that are mostly silence or music are left out of the ranking, because the detected label on them is noise.
How many languages does WhipScribe transcribe?
99+ languages are supported; 70 appeared in real recordings in these 90 days.
Cite this
WhipScribe, "Which languages do people transcribe most? Measured", production data 28 July 2026 to 25 October 2026, measured 26 October 2026. https://whipscribe.com/proof/languages
Free to quote and chart with that line (CC BY 4.0). Raw figures: /proof/languages.json.
More from the production record: how long recordings are · how much of a recording is speech · when people transcribe · formats, links and devices · how fast it transcribes · all proof pages · fact sheet.
See also: Transcription services · Turnaround time · Evidence log · Pricing · Privacy · Terms