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WILL THE INTERNET ALWAYS SPEAK ENGLISH

Written by:  Geoffrey Nunberg

   I
   n 1898, when Otto von Bismarck was an old man, a journalist asked him
   what he took to be the decisive factor in modern history. He answered,
   "The fact that the North Americans speak English." In retrospect, he
   was spot on the mark about the political and economic developments of
   the twentieth century, and up to now he seems to have been prescient
   about the development of the technologies that will shape the next
   one.

   The Internet was basically an American development, and it naturally
   spread most rapidly among the other countries of the English-speaking
   world. Right now, for example, there are roughly as many Internet
   users in Australia as in either France or Italy, and the
   English-speaking world as a whole accounts for over 80 percent of
   top-level Internet hosts and generates close to 80 percent of Internet
   traffic.

   It isn't surprising, then, that the Web is dominated by English. Two
   years ago my colleague Hinrich Schütze and I used an automatic
   language identification procedure to survey about 2.5 million Web
   pages and found that about 85 percent of the text was in English. The
   overall proportion of English may have diminished since then--a 1999
   survey of several hundred million pages done at ExciteHome showed
   English with 72 percent, followed by Japanese with 7 percent and
   German with 5 percent, and then by French, Chinese, and Spanish, all
   with between 1 and 2 percent. Figures like these are invariably
   inexact. But there's no question that the proportion of English will
   remain disproportionately high for some time to come, if only because
   use of the Web is still growing faster in the English-speaking world
   than in most other language communities--in the past two years, the
   number of Internet hosts in English-speaking countries has increased
   by about 450 percent, against 420 percent in Japan, 375 percent in the
   French-speaking world, and 250 percent in the German-speaking world.

   To a lot of observers, all of this suggests that the Internet is just
   one more route along which English will march on an ineluctable course
   of world conquest. The Sunday New York Times ran a story a while ago
   with the headline "World, Wide, Web: 3 English Words," and the editor
   of a magazine called The Futurist predicts that, thanks to new
   technologies, English will become the native language of a majority of
   the world by some time in the next century. Indeed, one linguist has
   suggested in all earnestness that the United Nations should simply
   declare English the official world language, but rename it Globalese,
   so as not to imply that it belongs to any one speech community
   anymore.
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   You may have the feeling that this maneuver would not allay the
   anxieties of speakers of other languages, who not surprisingly view
   the prospect of an English-dominated Web with a certain alarm. The
   director of a Russian Internet service provider recently described the
   Web as "the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism." And French
   President Jacques Chirac was even more apocalyptic, describing the
   prevalence of English on the Internet as a "major risk for humanity,"
   which threatens to impose linguistic and cultural uniformity on the
   world--a perception that led the French government to mandate that all
   Web sites in France must provide their content in French.

   O
   n the face of things, the concern is understandable. It isn't just
   that English is statistically predominant on the Web. There is also
   the heightened impression of English dominance that's created by the
   ubiquitous accessibility of Web documents. If you do an AltaVista
   search on "Roland Barthes," for example, you'll find about nine times
   as many documents in English as in French. That may or may not be
   wildly disproportionate to the rate of print publication about
   Barthes, but it's bound to be disconcerting to a Parisian who is used
   to browsing the reassuringly Francophone shelves of bookstores and
   libraries.

   Then too, it isn't just Anglophones who are using English on the Web.
   A lot of the English-language Web sites are based in
   non-English-speaking countries. Sometimes English is an obvious
   practical choice, for example in nations like Egypt, Latvia, and
   Turkey, where few speakers of the local language are online and the
   Internet is still thought of chiefly as a tool for international
   communication. But the tendency to use English doesn't disappear even
   when a lot of speakers of the local language have Internet access.
   Since the Web turns every document into a potentially "international"
   publication, there's often an incentive for publishing Web sites in
   English that wouldn't exist with print documents that don't ordinarily
   circulate outside national borders. And this in turn has made the use
   of English on the Web a status symbol in many nations, since it
   implies that you have something to say that might merit international
   attention.

   It isn't easy to measure how many sites in nations like France,
   Germany, or Sweden are posting content in English, partly because it
   isn't clear what things to count and partly because large numbers of
   users in these places have accounts with addresses that can't be
   identified by nationality. (America Online alone has more than a
   million subscribers in Germany.) But the use of English is clearly
   extensive, if not quite as overwhelming as people sometimes believe.
   In our study, Schütze and I found that the proportion of English tends
   to be highest where the local language has a relatively small number
   of speakers and where competence in English is high. In Holland and
   Scandinavia, for example, English pages run as high as 30 percent of
   the total; in France and Germany, they account for around 15-20
   percent; and in Latin America, they account for 10 percent or less.

   Netting cultural Diversity

   Still, it's a mistake to assume that any gains English makes on the
   Internet will have to come at the expense of other languages. The
   Internet is not like print or other media, where languages are in
   competition for finite communicative resources. A French movie theater
   has to choose between showing Steven Spielberg or Eric Rohmer, and a
   print medical journal can't print multilingual versions without
   substantially increasing its costs. But on the Internet, the diffusion
   of information is not a zero-sum game. The economics of distribution
   make multilingual publication on the Web much more feasible than it is
   in print, which is why a large number of commercial and government
   sites in Europe and Asia (and even, increasingly, in the United
   States) are making their content available in two or more languages.

   Then, too, there are strong forces militating for the use of local
   languages on the Web. An increasing proportion of new users who are
   coming online in places like France or Italy are individuals and small
   businesses who are chiefly interested in using the Net for local
   communication, unlike the large firms or public institutions who have
   made up the first wave of adopters. An airline company or research
   center in Germany may have an incentive to post its Web pages in
   English, but a singles club or apartment rental agency does not. And
   as more people in a language community come online, content and
   service providers have a strong interest in accommodating them in
   their own language. Yahoo! has put up localized versions in French,
   Spanish, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Chinese, Korean,
   and Japanese, and in all of these markets it is facing competition
   from other portals, both American and local. By now, the speakers of
   major languages don't have to leave their linguistic neighborhood to
   consult an online newspaper or encyclopedia; hunt for jobs or housing;
   participate in discussion about horticulture, stocks, or soccer; or
   buy air tickets, books, perfume, furniture, or software. By limiting
   search engines and portals to resources in their own language, users
   can choose to ignore the sea of English content on the Web--and they
   are not likely to miss it much. That AltaVista search for
   French-language sites on "Roland Barthes," for example, turns up 498
   hits. That may be many fewer than the more than 4,200 English-language
   sites on Barthes, but it's a lot more than most people need or have
   time to sort through.

   T
   his is not to say that the Internet won't have important linguistic
   effects. Ultimately it could be comparable to the importance of print,
   which first created standardized national languages and then helped to
   create a sense of national community around them. The mistake is to
   assume that the effects will be measurable in raw percentages of
   global language use. The "how many speakers?" games that language
   chauvinists like to play have always been one of the sillier
   manifestations of cultural rivalries--like Olympic gold medal counts,
   only a lot more inexact. What matters is not simply how widely a
   language is used, but why and when people use it and how it figures
   into their sense of social identity.

   This is where the distinctive properties of the Net come into play.
   Notably, electronic communication doesn't require large capital
   concentrations to produce and distribute content, so it needn't entail
   the centralization that print and broadcast do. And also unlike print,
   the cost of diffusion of electronic documents doesn't increase
   proportionately with the distance or dispersion of the audience. To be
   sure, these effects are only relative. Posting a Web site that is
   actually accessible to hundreds of thousands of users requires a large
   capital investment in both technology and publicity, and overall
   activity tends to center on a small number of sites. A recent study by
   Alexa Internet showed that the top 2 percent of Web sites account for
   95 percent of the total number of clicks, and other surveys suggest
   that the concentration of activity is becoming more marked--the
   proportion of users' time given to the 50 most popular Web sites has
   gone from 27 percent to 35 percent over the past year.

   Moreover, communication between historically marginal regions is still
   limited by the available infrastructure--at present, for example, Hong
   Kong and Tokyo have roughly 50 times as much bandwidth to the United
   States as either does to other Asian cities. But the Internet is still
   a much more decentralized medium than print, particularly if we
   include the use of e-mail, discussion lists, and other forms that have
   no real print equivalents. And it's far more efficient than print or
   broadcast in reaching small or geographically dispersed audiences,
   whether we're thinking of the markets for scholarly books or medieval
   music or of the Welsh-speaking community.

   Triumph of the Vernacular

   One important consequence of all this is to make the choice of
   language chiefly dependent on the purpose of communication rather than
   on economics or geography. But this can work to the advantage of
   different languages in different situations. For example, English has
   always been the dominant medium for international trade in books,
   records, software, and travel arrangements. But now those transactions
   aren't conducted just by distributors, retailers, and travel agents,
   but by individuals, who consequently find themselves using English to
   buy things that they used to buy using their local vernacular. And
   there is a similar effect in science, where English is increasingly
   being used not just in its traditional role as the language of
   published research but also in informal Internet discussions of
   methodology, professional gossip, or theoretical speculation--the
   sorts of topics that used to be reserved for face-to-face
   conversations in the lab or lunchroom, conducted in whatever the local
   language happened to be.

   But for other purposes, the Internet strengthens the role of national
   and regional languages. Take the diffusion of news. In the worlds of
   print and broadcast, it's only the Englishlanguage media--more
   specifically, the American media--that have been able to achieve
   anything like genuine worldwide news distribution. You can sometimes
   find a French television news program on cable in big cities in the
   United States or a three-day-old copy of Le Figaro at an international
   news dealer, but they aren't available in every hotel room and at
   every street corner the way CNN and the International Herald Tribune
   are in France. And for languages like Greek, Catalan, or Hindi, the
   circulation of information pretty much stops at national or regional
   borders.

   With the Web, this all changes. French speakers in non-Francophone
   regions have access to the online versions of 20 or 30 French-language
   newspapers and to as many direct radio transmissions, and Web
   transmission of TV programming will become routine as bandwidth
   increases. The speakers of less widely used languages are nearly as
   well served--Yahoo! lists electronic versions of newspapers from
   Malaysia, Indonesia, Colombia, Turkey, Qatar, and about 70 or 80 other
   nations. At the same time, it's becoming easier for the members of
   these language communities to get remote access to government
   information, educational materials, scientific journals, and,
   ultimately, the digitized collections of the major national libraries.
   And while the Web won't seriously undermine the global dominance of
   American movies or music, it makes it much easier to distribute
   cultural products from other nations--even if a new film by Eric
   Rohmer or a new album by Claude Nougaro doesn't get extensive foreign
   distribution, individuals will be able to order or download it
   directly.

   No less important, the Net creates new forums for informal exchanges
   among the members of geographically dispersed communities. At present
   there are discussion groups in more than 100 languages, including not
   just major national languages but Basque, Breton, Cambodian, Catalan,
   Gaelic, Hmong, Macedonian, Navaho, Swahili, Welsh, and Yoruba, among
   others. (One Yiddish speaker I know who's in her 40s says that before
   the Internet she had never had a conversation in that language with
   anyone younger than her parents' generation.)

   These efficiencies of distribution work to the particular advantage of
   dispersed language communities--whether linguistic diasporas like the
   Indonesians, Russians, or Greeks living abroad or postcolonial
   populations that have up to now existed in the linguistic penumbra of
   the metropolis. People in the Francophone Caribbean or the Mahgreb,
   for example, can have much quicker and more extensive access to
   French-language content produced in other regions than with print or
   broadcast.

   In many of these regions, it's true, Internet connections will chiefly
   benefit government agencies, universities, and major industries. But
   in other places, there are substantial populations in a position to
   take advantage of the more immediate ties to their larger linguistic
   community--the Hungarians in Slovakia, the Chinese in Southeast Asia,
   the Francophones in western Canada, or the Russians in many parts of
   Eastern Europe. In theory, this could lead to a closer sense of
   connection within language communities like these, not just between
   the cultural centers and the peripheries but also between distant
   communities that have never been in direct contact before. People in
   Angola can log onto the excellent Web site of the Portuguese Ministry
   of Culture, for example, but they can also establish easy connections
   with other Lusiphones in Mozambique, Brazil, or Fall River,
   Massachusetts.

   How Universal a Net?

   All of this presupposes, of course, that sufficient numbers of people
   in the community will have Internet access, which will be a long time
   coming in many parts of the world. Right now, for example, China and
   India each have around two million Internet users, and there are
   between three and four million in Hispanophone Latin America. (One
   reason it's hard to estimate Net use in many of these nations is that
   large numbers of people make use of Internet cafes or office machines
   and have e-mail accounts with Web services like hotmail.com.) And
   while the Net is growing rapidly in most of these nations, severe
   barriers must be overcome. There are only 10 telephones per 100 people
   in Latin America, for example, and only 2 per 100 in India, and while
   there are ambitious plans for extending the Internet via wireless
   communication, these face daunting technical and economic
   difficulties. Even where service is available, moreover, it is often
   expensive--monthly Internet access costs three times as much in
   Argentina as in the United States, five times as much in Kenya, and
   six times as much in Armenia, disparities that are aggravated by
   differences in average incomes.

   Even as a medium for elite communication, of course, the Internet can
   play an important role, particularly in language communities that are
   poorly served by traditional media, whether for geographic or
   political reasons. In the Chinese-speaking world, for example, the Net
   has become an important forum for political discussion, despite the
   efforts of the Chinese government to restrict access to unacceptable
   sites and the often intemperate tone of the discussions. (When you
   look at discussion groups carried out in languages from Chinese to
   Indonesian to Spanish, you are struck by how the flame has become a
   universal genre.)
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   But what of the developed world, where the Internet is accessible to a
   large part of the population? Will it ultimately reshape the sense of
   the language community the way print did? Some enthusiasts have
   suggested that the Net will wind up making languages rather than
   nations the primary social bond. As one international marketing firm
   puts it: "People speaking the same language form their own online
   community no matter what country they happen to live in." This is
   stretching a point, to put it mildly. Granted, the Internet makes it
   possible for French, German, or English speakers in different nations
   to engage in daily conversation with one another, which doubtless
   increases their sense of linguistic connection. But these people have
   already been exchanging books, movies, and TV shows for a number of
   years, and while purists have always complained that this sort of
   communication dilutes the national culture, the fact is that there
   hasn't been any real lessening of people's sense of distinct national
   identities--or, from the marketer's point of view, of their distinct
   patterns of consumption. Belgians persist in feeling Belgian;
   Australians persist in feeling Australian; Austrians persist in
   feeling Austrian. So it's hard to believe that the nation will start
   to wither away just because people from different parts of the
   language community are wired to the Net.

   Yet the Internet may have important linguistic effects even on
   communities like these, by altering the kind of language that matters
   in public life. Since the eighteenth century, most developed societies
   have recognized a distinction between two varieties of language. The
   first is the informal, rapidly changing variety that you learn in the
   normal course of socialization, which is adapted to private
   communication between individuals who have a lot of background in
   common. The second is a conservative and relatively formal variety
   used in published writing and broadcasting--a variety that requires
   explicit instruction and that is designed to communicate to an
   anonymous audience who can't be presumed to know much about the
   writer's circumstances or background. This variety may be loosely
   based on middle-class speech, but it aims at being a neutral and
   universal medium, and it tends to be less susceptible to regional and
   national variation (The Economist is a lot easier for Americans to
   follow than a conversation in a London pub). Traditionally, this is
   the form of language that we look to dictionaries to record for us and
   that attracts most of our critical concerns about the state of the
   language and its consequences for public life.

   But the Internet blurs this distinction, even as it blurs the
   distinction between "public" and "private" communication. The language
   of the innumerable discussion groups and bulletin boards of the Net
   has much of the tone of private communication--it's informal,
   elliptical, and allusive. But it is conversation filtered by a battery
   of conventions adapted to its new function. I'm thinking of not just
   the rich etiquette for responding, cc'ing participants, including
   quotes from other messages you've received, and so forth, but the
   subtler ways that the informalities of private conversation are
   tailored for use in a semipublic forum. That's why these discussions
   can be so difficult for foreigners to participate in, even when
   they're entirely comfortable with formal written English. What's more
   worrisome still, they can also marginalize native speakers who aren't
   privy to the norms of middle-class speech, by which I mean not so much
   the forms and spellings of the standard language as the way people
   deploy it in the back-and-forth of ordinary conversation. It's one
   thing to know when to say, "I'm afraid I have to take issue with Ms.
   Price's conclusions" and another--much more difficult to get the hang
   of--to know when it's appropriate to say, "You've gotta be kidding."

   There's a troubling paradox in all this. The forums of the Internet
   undoubtedly create the opportunity for a wider and more participatory
   public discourse than has ever before been possible. True, we may want
   to be a little skeptical of the visionaries' picture of these
   interactive forums as the nuclei of a new "electronic commons" that
   will wind up displacing traditional political institutions with a
   direct democracy--it's in their nature to be too chaotic, too
   fragmented, and too unreliable to bear all the burden. But they have
   already become important secondary media for transacting political
   life, both as places where the news is critically interpreted and as
   sources of information (sometimes correct) that the press has not
   adequately reported.

   Yet even as they open up the discourse, these forums can also restrict
   and circumscribe participation in it, as the neutral language of the
   traditional op-ed page yields to something that has more of the tone
   of conversation in a Palo Alto coffee bar. This may ultimately be the
   most important linguistic issue raised by the technology. What does it
   matter how widely English or any other language is used on the
   Internet if the language used there has become less of a common medium
   for its speakers? ¤
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                            [4]Geoffrey Nunberg
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   Copyright © 2000 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation:
   Geoffrey Nunberg, "Will the Internet always Speak English," The
   American Prospect vol. 11 no. 10, March 27-April 10, 2000.This article
   may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any
   kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct
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