Article from The American Prospect

[Anne Lambert]

I was interested in reading this article.  I'd also be interested in
comments on the question: Will English always be the dominant language of
the world (not most spoken--Chinese is that--but used in international and
inter-language group communication everywhere)?
    My answer is No.  No international language has lasted forever--even
Latin or Greek.  My prediction is that at some time--maybe a hundred or two
hundred years in the future--some other language will arise and gradually
take the dominant place that English now has.  The most likely candidates, I
think, are Spanish and Chinese--although Chinese will have to be used in the
Pinyin spelling or whatever may replace it.
    R.M.W. Dixon suggests that in a few hundred years there will be only one
world language--not just one dominant language but one language.  I doubt
this also.

"lynnem at cogs.susx.ac.uk-Unverified Address" wrote:

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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? €
>      _________________________________________________________________
>
>                   Click here for information on the author
>                             [4]Geoffrey Nunberg
>      _________________________________________________________________
>
>    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
>    questions about permissions to [5]permissions at prospect.org.
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>
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