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David Crystal explains how the internet is turni~gout to be a friend to all the world's languages

The global English debate

Weaving a Web oflinguistic diversity

David Crystal is honorary professorof linguistics at the UniveTsity ofWales, Bang01: His book LanguageAnd The Internet will be publishedby Cambridge Universit'1J PTess lateTth'isyear

There are also practical problems,though a great deal has been donesince the mid-90s to address them.First, the Ascii character set still failsto adequately support the array ofletter shapes in Arabic, Hindi,Chinese, Korean and the many otherlanguages in the world that do notuse the Latin alphabet. The Unicodecoding -system, the alternative toAscii, allows more than 65,000 char­acters; but the implementation ofthis system is still in its infancy. TheWeb consortium has an internation­alisation activity looking specificallyat different alphabets, se that operat­ing systems can support a page in anyalphabet.

The future looks good for Webmultilingualism. As Ned Thomascommented last year in an editorialfor COI;1tact,the bulletin ofthe Euro-­pean Bureau of Lesser Used Lan­guages: "It is not the case ... that alllanguages will be marginalised onthe Net by English. On the contrary,there will be a great demand formultilingual websites, for multi­lingual data retrieval, for machinetranslation, for voice recognitionsystems to be multilingual."

And 1Yler Chambers, the creator ofvarious Web language projects,agrees: "The future of the intern et iseven more multilingualism and cross­cultural exploration and under­standing than we've already seen."

I agree. The Web offers a WorldWide Welcome for global linguisticdiversity.

they allow us to see languages as theyare. In many cases, the total Webpresence, in terms of number ofpages, is small. The crucial point isthat the languages are out there, evenif represented by only a sprinklingof sites. It is the ideal medium forminority languages, given the rela­tive cheapness and ease of creating aWeb page, compared with the costs ofprint, TV or radio.

However, developing a significant('ylwr-pl'('sl'Il('('ls Ilot ('asy.Unlil Iterit­kllllllllssofilllt'lIlt'l p('IWll'lIllol1 11111coulIlry hullds Up,lllIt! 11('OIlt'SPOIlt!ing mass of ('ollt('1l1('xlsl~111ltlU' locallanguage, the lIlotivlllion 10 switchfrom English-language sites will belimited to those for whom issues ofidentity outweigh issues of informa­tion. The future is also dependent onthe levels of English-speaking abilityin individual countries, and thefurther growth in those levels.

Students at Cairo's al-Azhar University join the small but growing number ofArabic speakers using the internet Photograph: Mohammed AI-Sehiti

is illustrated by some 5,000 words,along with proverbs, naming pat­terns and greetings. Another sitedeals with 87 European minoritylanguages. Some sites are small incontent, but extensive in range: onegives the Lord's Prayer in nearly 500languages.

Nobody has yet worked out justhow many languages have obtained amodicum of presence on the Web. Ihave found more than 1,000, It is notdifficult to find ('vid('I1('(' of 11 N('tpresel1ce [or tl1(' vast lI11dorlty o[the more frequently used langu<l!-;l's,and for a large number of minoritylanguages too. I would guess thatabout a quarter of the world'slanguages have some sort of internetpresence.

In all these examples we areencountering language presence in areal sense. These are not sites thatonly analyse or talk about languages;

commentators predicting that beforelong the Web (and the internet as awhole) will be predominantly non­English, as communications infra­structure develops in Europe, Asia,Mrica and South America. A GlobalReach survey has estimated thatpeople with internet access in non­English-speaking countries increasedfrom 7m to 136m between 1995 and2000. In 1998 the total number ofnew non-Englishwebsites passed thenumber of new English websites.

At a conference on search enginestrategies last April, Alta Vista waspredicting that by next year less thanhalf of the Web would be in English.English-language author David Grad­dol has predicted an even lowerfigure in due course, 40%. In partsof the world the local language isalready. dominant. According to theJapanese internet author YoshiMikami, 90% of Web p<fgesin Japanare now in Japanese.

The Web is increasingly reflectingthe distribution oflanguage presencein the real world, and many sites pro­vide the evidence. They range fromindividual businesses doing theirbest to present a multilingual iden­tity to big sites collecting data onmany languages. Under the firstheading we encounter such news­papers as the Belgian daily Le Soil',which is represen ted by six languages- French, Dutch, English, German,Italian and Spanish. Under the latterheading we find' such sites as theUniversity of Oregon Font Archive,providing 112fonts in its archives formore than 40 languages.

A World Language Resources sitelists products for 728 languages. AnMrican resource list covers severallocal languages; Yoruba, for example,

The World Wide Web is an eclecticmedium, holding a mirror up to ourlinguistic nature. Not only does itoffer a home to all linguistic styleswithin a language; it offers a home toall languages - once their commun­ities have a functioning computertechnology. And its increasinglymultilingual character has been themost notable change since it startedout as a totally English medium.

For many people the language ofthe internet is English. "World, Wide,Web: three English words" was theheadline of a piece by Michael Specterin the New York Times a few yearsago. The article went on to comment:"If you want to take full advantage ofthe internet there is only one real wayto do it: learn English."

Specter did acknowledge thearrival of other languages: '~s theWeb grows, the number of people onit who speak French, say, or Russianwill become more varied and thatvariety will be expressed on the Web.That is why it is a fundamentallydemocratic technology. But it won'tnecessarily happen soon."

The evidence is growing that thisconclusion was wrong. With theinternet's globalisation the presenceof other languages has steadily risen.By the mid-90s a widely quoted figurewas that about 80% of the Net was inEnglish - a figure supported by thefirst big study of language distribu­tion on the internet, carried out in1997 by Babel, ajoint initiative oftheInternet Society and Alis Technol­ogies. This showed English well ahead,but with several other languages ­notably German, Japanese, Frenchand Spanish - entering the ring.

Since then the estimates for Eng­lish have been falling, with some