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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
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