The Internet and Languages [around the year 2000] — Background and Themes

hy 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 Hit Parade". The main languages were English with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese 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 Associates, an international marketing consultancy, there were 56 million non-English- speaking users in July 1998, with 22.4% Spanish-speaking users, 12.3% Japanese-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 Cybérie", a weekly French-language online report of internet news. He wrote in August 1999: "We passed 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 documents 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 Institute 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 Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle. Caoimhín has taught computing at the Institute Sabhal Mór 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"