[ot] [!nt] \n2+0\

[integer at www.god-emil.dk]

Languages in Cyberspace 

Remarkably little attention has been given to the implications of language use on the Internet. We here reproduce a thoughtful Commentary broadcast on
National Public Radio's program, "Fresh Air". The text is copyrighted 1996 by the author, and reprinted here by permission.

E-Babel

by Geoffrey Nunberg

In 1898, when Otto von Bismarck was an old man, a journalist asked him what he thought was the decisive factor in modern history. He answered without
skipping a beat: "The fact that the North Americans speak English." You wonder what he would have said if they'd had a Net account at the Reichs Chancellery.

Everybody seems certain that cyberspace is going to be an English lake, and some people think it will wind up inundating everything else in the world in the
process. The Sunday New York Times ran a story a couple of weeks ago with the headline "World, Wide, Web: Three English Words". One computer writer
described the Internet as a great force for the Anglification of the planet, and the editor of a magazine called The Futurist predicts that thanks to new media
English will become the native language of a majority of the world by some time in the next century. And indeed, one linguist has suggested that the UN should
simply declare English the world language, but rename it Globalese so as not to imply that it belongs to any one community anymore.

Frankly, I have my doubts as to whether Bismarck would have been completely reassured by this maneuver. Certainly theres no shortage of people who view
the prospect of a monolingual English Net with some alarm. The director of a Russian Internet provider described the Web as the ultimate act of intellectual
colonialism. And French President Jacques Chirac was even more apocalyptic, describing English domination of the Internet as a major risk for humanity, with
its threat of linguistic and cultural uniformity.

Is any of it warranted - the neocolonialist swaggering on one side, the hysteria on the other? Like most of what's said about and on the Internet, the discussion
tends to be long on speculation and short on data (NOTE 1). There's no question that English is overwhelmingly dominant on the Net right now, but a lot of that
is due to accidental factors. The Internet was an American development, and something between 70 and 90 percent of its present users are from the
English-speaking countries (NOTE 2). But the proportion of native English speakers on the Internet is dropping very rapidly, particularly as Net service
providers and search services proliferate in other countries, and as people overcome the difficulties of sending and receiving accented characters and non-Roman
alphabets (NOTE 3). Its a safe bet that we English speakers will be in the minority well before the end of the century (NOTE 4). Even then, of course, there's no
question that English will still be the principal lingua franca for Internet communication, just as it already is for most international science, business, and tourism.
In fact there are reports that the advent of the Net has intensified the interest in learning English among students in places like Brazil and Germany. But that's
mostly old news. What makes the Net different from most of the communications technologies that preceded it is how much it does to preserve linguistic
distinctions. The telegraph, the telephone, the radio all made the world smaller. Now finally we have a technology that helps to keep the world big and polyglot
(NOTE 5).

One reason for this is that languages aren't in competition on the Net the way they are in print or other media. A Danish rock festival can post its Web page in
English and German for the benefit of foreigners, but it also posts a version in Danish so the locals dont feel slighted. And for that matter the National Library of
Wales can post its Web page in English and Welsh. In fact you could argue that the languages that have the most to gain here are the ones that are too small or
scattered to support a lot of the traditional print medid Esperanto (I'm here to tell you, before the Net I had no idea how
many Esperanto enthusiasts there were out there, and I suspect that neither did they). But every language group is taking advantage of this. In a half-hour's
wandering around the Net the other day I found discussion groups conducted in more than 60 languages, at which point I stopped counting (NOTE 6). The
Italians were talking about the elections, as they always are. The French people are exchanging dirty jokes. The Indonesians as best I could tell were arguing
over whether the movie True Lies was anti-Islam or merely stupid. All of which confirms the lesson we have already learned from the proliferation of
discussion groups on domestic Internet services: if you give people the chance, they are less interested in turning the Net into a world forum than a back-yard
fence. There's a new Tower of Babel, and it has an Intel sticker on the side.



Reported Without Comment

On August 9, 1996, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that, beginning September 3, weekly news briefings would be conducted only in
Chinese, without English translation. An editorial in the Peoples Daily applauded the move as a sign that China was becoming a strong nation. The newspaper
argued that The position of China on the international scene is rising every day, and the Chinese language is becoming a very influential language in the world.
When any nation is internationally respected, it is natural that its language also be internationally respected. 

The decision angered many foreign journalists, who speak English but not Chinese. Foreign Ministry spokesman Shen Guofang announced that the move was
"irreversible, ... I will only answer questions that are asked in Chinese". 






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