The Internet and Languages Part 1

The Internet and Languages.

by Marie Lebert.

INTRODUCTION

It is true that the internet transcends the limitations of time, distances and borders, but what about languages? Non-English-speaking internet users reached 50% in July 2000.

# "Language Nations"

"Because the internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'... all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the U.S., as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco." (Randy Hobler, consultant in internet marketing for translation products and services, September 1998)

# "Linguistic Democracy"

"Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a human right for every child in the world by a UNESCO report in the early 1950s, 'mother- tongue surfing' may very well be the Information Age equivalent. If the internet is to truly become the Global Network that it is promoted as being, then all users, regardless of language background, should have access to it. To keep the internet as the preserve of those who, by historical accident, practical necessity, or political privilege, happen to know English, is unfair to those who don't." (Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Inst.i.tute, September 1998)

# A medium for the world

"It is very important to be able to communicate in various languages. I would even say this is mandatory, because the information given on the internet is meant for the whole world, so why wouldn't we get this information in our language or in the language we wish? Worldwide information, but no broad choice for languages, this would be quite a contradiction, wouldn't it?" (Maria Victoria Marinetti, teacher in Spanish and translator, August 1999)

# Good software

"When software gets good enough for people to chat or talk on the web in real time in different languages, then we will see a whole new world appear before us. Scientists, political activists, businesses and many more groups will be able to communicate immediately without having to go through mediators or translators." (Tim McKenna, writer and philosopher, October 2000)

Unless specified otherwise, quotations are excerpts from NEF interviews. Many thanks to all those who are quoted in this book, and who kindly answered questions about multilingualism over the years.

Most interviews are available online . This book is also available in French, with a different text. Both versions are available online . The author, whose mother tongue is French, is responsible for any remaining mistakes in English.

Marie Lebert is a researcher and editor specializing in technology for books, other media, and languages. Her books are published by NEF (Net des etudes francaises / Net of French Studies), University of Toronto, Canada, and are freely available online .

"LANGUAGE NATIONS" ONLINE

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Randy Hobler, a consultant in internet marketing for Globalink, a company specializing in language translation software and services, wrote in September 1998: "Because the internet has no national boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'...

all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the U.S., as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco."

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At first, the internet was nearly 100% English. A network was set up by the Pentagon in 1969, before spreading to U.S. governmental agencies and universities from 1974 onwards, after Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn invented TCP/IP (transmission control protocol / internet protocol).

After the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989-90 by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the distribution of the first browser Mosaic, the ancestor of Netscape, from November 1993 onwards, the internet really took off, first in the U.S. and Canada, then worldwide.

Why did the internet spread in North America first? The U.S. and Canada were leading the way in computer science and communication technology, and a connection to the internet, mainly through a phone line at the time, was much cheaper than in most countries. In Europe, avid internet users needed to navigate the web at night, when phone rates by the minute were cheaper, to cut their expenses. In 1998, some French, Italian and German users were so fed up with the high rates that they launched a movement to boycott the internet one day per week, for internet providers and phone companies to set up a special monthly rate for them. This paid off, and providers began to offer monthly "internet rates".

In the 1990s, the percentage of English decreased from nearly 100% to 80%. People from all over the world began to have access to the internet, and to post more and more webpages in their own languages.

The first major study about language distribution on the web was run by Babel, a joint initiative from Alis Technologies, a company specializing in language translation services, and the Internet Society. The results were published in June 1997 on a webpage named "Web Languages. .h.i.t Parade". The main languages were English with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, j.a.panese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.

In "Web Embraces Language Translation", an article published in ZDNN (ZDNetwork News) on 21 July 1998, Martha L. Stone explained: "This year, the number of new non-English websites is expected to outpace the growth of new sites in English, as the cyber world truly becomes a 'World Wide Web'."

According to Global Reach, a branch of Euro-Marketing a.s.sociates, an international marketing consultancy, there were 56 million non-English- speaking users in July 1998, with 22.4% Spanish-speaking users, 12.3% j.a.panese-speaking users, 14% German-speaking users, and 10% French- speaking users. But 80% of all webpages were still in English, whereas only 6% of the world population was speaking English as a native language, while 16% was speaking Spanish as a native language. 15% of Europe's half a billion population spoke English as a first language, 28% didn't speak English at all, and 32% were using the web in English.

Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cyberie", a weekly French-language online report of internet news. He wrote in August 1999: "We pa.s.sed a milestone this summer. Now more than half the users of the internet live outside the United States. Next year, more than half of all users will be non English-speaking, compared with only 5% five years ago. Isn't that great? (...) The web is going to grow in non-English-speaking regions. So we have to take into account the technical aspects of the medium if we want to reach these 'new' users.

I think it is a pity there are so few translations of important doc.u.ments and essays published on the web - from English into other languages and vice versa. (...) In the same way, the recent spreading of the internet in new regions raises questions which would be good to read about. When will Spanish-speaking communication theorists and those speaking other languages be translated?"

Will the web hold as many languages as the ones spoken on our planet?

This will be quite a challenge, with the 6,700 languages listed in "The Ethnologue: Languages of the World", an authoritative catalog published by SIL International (SIL: Summer Inst.i.tute of Linguistics) and freely available on the web since the mid-1990s.

The year 2000 was a turning point for a multilingual internet, regarding its users. Non English-speaking users reached 50% in summer 2000. According to Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001, 57% in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003 (including 34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians), and 64.2% in March 2004 (including 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 33% Asians).

Despite the so-called English-language hegemony some non-English- speaking intellectuals were complaining about, without doing much to promote their own language, the internet was also a good medium for minority languages, as stated by Caoimhin o Donnaile. Caoimhin has taught computing at the Inst.i.tute Sabhal Mor Ostaig, on the Island of Skye (Scotland). He has also created and maintained the college website, as 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."

TOWARDS A "LINGUISTIC DEMOCRACY"

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Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Inst.i.tute (WWLI), brought up the concept of "linguistic democracy" in September 1998: "Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a human right for every child in the world by a UNESCO report in the early 1950s, 'mother- tongue surfing' may very well be the Information Age equivalent. If the internet is to truly become the Global Network that it is promoted as being, then all users, regardless of language background, should have access to it. To keep the internet as the preserve of those who, by historical accident, practical necessity, or political privilege, happen to know English, is unfair to those who don't."

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Yos.h.i.+ Mikami, a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in Fujisawa (j.a.pan), launched in December 1995 the website "The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet", also known as the Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page. (The website was updated until September 2001.) Yos.h.i.+ was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and n.o.butos.h.i.+ Kohara) of "The Multilingual Web Guide" (j.a.panese edition), a print book published by O'Reilly j.a.pan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into English, French and German.

Yos.h.i.+ Mikami explained in December 1998: "My native tongue is j.a.panese.

Because I had my graduate education in the U.S. and worked in the computer business, I became bilingual in j.a.panese and American English.

I was always interested in languages and different cultures, so I learned some Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the web 'The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet' and tried to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and j.a.panese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two a.s.sociates to help me write a book on viewing, understanding and creating multilingual webpages, which was published in August 1997 as 'The Multilingual Web Guide', in a j.a.panese edition, the world's first book on such a subject."

Yos.h.i.+ added in the same email interview: "Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in several. In our modern world, most nation states have each adopted one language for their own use. I predict greater use of different languages and multilingual pages on the internet, not a simple gravitation to American English, and also more creative use of multilingual computer translation. 99% of the websites created in j.a.pan are written in j.a.panese."

Robert Ware launched his website OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996 as a "fast finder" in hundreds of online dictionaries. On September 2, 1998, the fast finder could "browse" 2,058,544 words in 425 dictionaries covering various topics: business, computer/internet, medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports, technology, general, and slang. OneLook Dictionaries was provided as a free service by the company Study Technologies, in Englewood, Colorado.

Robert Ware explained in September 1998: "On the personal side, I was almost entirely in contact with people who spoke one language and did not have much incentive to expand language abilities. Being in contact with the entire world has a way of changing that. And changing it for the better! (...) I have been slow to start including non-English dictionaries (partly because I am monolingual). But you will now find a few included."

In the same email interview, Robert wrote about a personal experience showing the internet could promote both a common language and multilingualism: "In 1994, I was working for a college and trying to install a software package on a particular type of computer. I located a person who was working on the same problem and we began exchanging email. Suddenly, it hit me... the software was written only 30 miles away but I was getting help from a person half way around the world.

Distance and geography no longer mattered! OK, this is great! But what is it leading to? I am only able to communicate in English but, fortunately, the other person could use English as well as German which was his mother tongue. The internet has removed one barrier (distance) but with that comes the barrier of language. It seems that the internet is moving people in two quite different directions at the same time.

The internet (initially based on English) is connecting people all around the world. This is further promoting a common language for people to use for communication. But it is also creating contact between people of different languages and creates a greater interest in multilingualism. A common language is great but in no way replaces this need. So the internet promotes both a common language *and*

multilingualism. The good news is that it helps provide solutions. The increased interest and need is creating incentives for people around the world to create improved language courses and other a.s.sistance, and the internet is providing fast and inexpensive opportunities to make them available."

The internet could also be a tool to develop a "cultural ident.i.ty".

During the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence organized by the International Labor Office (ILO) in January 1997, s.h.i.+nji Matsumoto, general secretary of the Musicians' Union of j.a.pan (MUJ), explained: "j.a.pan is quite receptive to foreign culture and foreign technology.