English Language Dominance of the Net May not Last, Says Martin Mulligan

And if you were browsing on the World Wide Web, the chances are you would still be reading in English. English-speaking Web sites are estimated to comprise 85 per cent of the present total, confirming the status of English as the dominant Internet language.

Other languages lag behind. Francophone Web sites, for instance, represent only about 2 per cent of Web space. Of 20,000 Web sites in French, 58 per cent originate in France, 20 per cent in Canada, 8 per cent in Belgium, 6 per cent elsewhere.

Europe’s other tongues fare even worse. There are many fewer pages in German than in French, though more sites originate in Germany, which suggests that Germans write many Web pages in English. The number of pages in Spanish is smaller still, with 80 per cent of them originating in Mexico.

At first glance, then, the supremacy of English – American English to be precise – as the language of international electronic trade seems well established, perhaps unassailable. With American English apparently poised to dominate the fast expanding universe of cyberspace, the rest of the world will be obliged to adopt it as a business – even a cultural − lingua franca.

Or will it? In fact, American English may be on borrowed time, elbowed aside in the not-so-distant future by the languages of stronger trading blocs. Jerry Knowles, author of A Cultural History of the English Language and senior lecturer in linguistics at Lancaster University in northern England, sees things very clearly.

“There are new Englishes in Asia and the tiger economies. If economic power passes to the tiger economies, they will be telling us what to do”, he says. In other words, telling us how to talk.

These new Englishes are not creoles but “a whole literary language, standard English modified by the local vernaculars, becoming standard languages in their own right,” Knowles says. He is emphatic that the new Englishes being spoken and written in India, east Africa, Singapore and Malaysia are bound to leave their mark.

“These are not foreign speakers of English, but speakers of a different variety of English,” Knowles says. He points out, for example, that although the word “thrice” is no longer used by American English speakers, it is alive and well in New Delhi English. Each variety of English is quite as valid and as consistent as the American English which at present rules the web.

There are strong historical precedents for the developments Knowles foresees. “Put yourself in the mind of a Roman soldiers in the heyday of Latin on the frontier of the empire [in northern Germany, near Denmark]. Imagine you told him that the people he was holding the line against would take over and we’d end up speaking their language. He’d refuse to believe it.” But it happened anyway, and long before the dawn of the Net, a communications revolution which has stimulated and accelerated contact between the 4,000 to 6,000 distinct languages of the world as never before in the history of the language animal.

Knowles’ Roman soldier analogy may be misleading in that the shift from Latin to Anglo-Saxon was complete and radical, whereas a shift from American English as the main business language would have to be very gradual.

However, the rapid progress in computerized translation since the 1970s encourages the hopes of those who look forward to an era of easy universal communication. The elementary Ascif computer code of that era did not even allow for European accents on letters. It effectively excluded people speaking half the world’s languages (especially nonwestern ones) from commerce or conversation on the Net.

All that has changed as Net growth outside the US has overtaken expansion within it. As the number of computers to be found in the rest of the world has grown – not least in the developing world – the urgent demand for translation software has increased as well. New codes allow a computer to display the characters of any language, including Russian, Korean and Japanese.

Steady progress is also being made translating communications from one language to another across the Net. Take, for example, Gobalink, a translation service based in Fairfax, Virginia, which offers automated translation on the World Wide Web.

The company’s Web Translator can turn English into French, German or Spanish and vice versa. It can translate straightforward sentences like “Your cheque is in the post”, but at present generates unintentional laughter whenever it is fed literature.

The first sentence of Ulysses − “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed” – from the Italian translation published by Mondadori, came back as “Solemn and chubby, Buck Mulligan appeared from the tall one... portandos a basin of foam… in cross a mirror.” Only James Joyce would not have been amused.

But even if automated translation services improve enormously, is the language animal, with the arrival of the Net, really on the threshold of near-instantaneous mutual understanding worldwide? Mark Bishop, Net and online services chief for Harper Collins in London, thinks not. And he wants to keep it that way.

“However good your translation software is, you are going to come up against cultural nuances,” Bishop insists. “In Narnia and in the Paddington stories, children walk on pavements, not sidewalks.”

The problem only gets worse with other languages and other cultures. “Take the word beheading. In England, with our history, it implies treason and has negative associations. But a Frenchman may see it as liberating, as a word with positive associations,” Bishop says.

Some cultures certainly appear more protective of their linguistic heritage than others. The French, justifiably proud of the Encyclopedie Larousse and the Academie Francaise, are notoriously purist in defence of their language.

Mireille Dechelette, attache linguistique at the French embassy in London, confirms official anxieties about the Net’s influence: “The French authorities have been very aware the content providers are English-speaking. But there are lots of French-speaking servers [now]. We are always asked: “Do you have a list of all the French-speaking serv­ers?”,” she says. “There is great awareness that we should not let the train pass. The list of French-speaking servers composed only a year ago is now completely out of date.”

Slow on to the Net because of the inability of early com­puter code to render accents on letters, the French are now making up for lost time.

Bishop sees two develop­ments affecting language on the Net. “The first wave − the one we’re experiencing now − is globalisation. The next wave will be very different − localisation,” he says. “The Net works on two lev­els. Companies are very excited by the global dimen­sion. But, equally, the Net is giving birth to the locality again. We are seeing an upsurge in local Net commu­nities.”

Non-English speakers are starting to seek each other out, and are forming common-language communi­ties in the same way that the Net brings together users interested in micro-brew­eries or Elvis. These commu­nities want to be integrated, but not assimilated or over­whelmed. The question that arises is how to protect national and cultural identi­ties. “Certain areas of con­tent may even be blocked off in the medium term,” says Bishop, citing the creation of a Chinese intranet as an example.

China and certain other countries want access to the Web for business and educational purposes but they emphatically do not want unrestricted global access.

Preserving cultural pri­vacy, says Bishop, is at least as important to some people as facilitating communication. China’s post and tele­communications minister Wu Jichuan has said: “By linking with the Internet we don’t mean absolute freedom of information. I think there is general understanding about this. If you go through customs, you have to show your passport. It’s the same with management of information.”

While business on the Net continues for the time being to be conducted mainly in American English, other lan­guages will surely gain ground in cyberspace. At least some of these will try to expand their influence while attempting to set lim­its to the sharing of informa­tion. Whether or not such a strategy is realistic in the long term remains to be seen.

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