It can be argued that the internet is a force driving the world’s population towards several common languages. As it becomes increasingly important to be online, smaller languages may fall by the wayside. The computing industry itself is not very language friendly, especially for those languages that don’t use a major alphabet like Latin. Most keyboards use one of a handful of alphabets and the majority of software and information online is in English and Chinese.
Does this spell doom for the other 7000 or so languages that are in use today? As I have written before, machine translation is one solution. However, this is imperfect even between similar languages such as English and German. Accurate translation between the different language families is still a distant dream. Another way of survival for less used languages would be for more people learn them. Here the internet can help by connecting students with native speakers and language teachers around the world. While it is known that human interaction is the best way to learn a language, getting a good Hausa teacher in your city might be a challenge. Virtual worlds and large online multiplayer games already facilitate spoken communication using VoIP in an interactive setting. A more formal teaching tool is being developed by a startup called Myngle. The company is developing a platform that will use a combination of VoIP, collaborations spaces and podcasts to allow students and teachers to self organize around learning different languages. The goal is to allow anyone to learn any language. While the unifying forces will likely continue to consolidate the languages used to communicate online, the long tail of language learning will at least give the others an opportunity to be exposed to the world.
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[...] statistiques vues sur Wikinomics à propos de la langue des utilisateurs d’internet. On y apprend qu’il y a 59 [...]
Pingback by La langue d’internet | Michel Leblanc, M.Sc. commerce électronique. Marketing Internet, consultant, conférencier et auteur - November 20, 2007 8:47 am
The quality of machine translation may improve more quickly than you suggest, but in any event that and the very interesting phenomenon of how the internet can link speakers (and learners) of less widely spoken languages are but pare of the “long tail” effect for languages.
Another aspect is simply “lowering the bar” for use of diverse languages a range of ICTs, in various software (from wordprocessors to speech-to-text), and even in “traditional” media such as books. On the latter, the potential to produce digital content in any language that can be printed on-demand is a classic long-tail effect - the economic hurdles to production and distribution of books for minority languages are eliminated.
Chris Anderson’s point about the importance of the head of the distribution (English, Chinese, etc.) to accessing the tail is apropos here. Not just for learners. Native speakers of minority languages (for whom mantras of “you won’t get a job speaking that” and even linguistic prejudice weigh heavily) have, in theory, a possibility of having the best of both worlds.
Comment by Don Osborn - November 28, 2007 2:21 pm
[...] the need for people to understand each other in order to travel, do business and learn. However, as I have written before, the internet is not yet particularly friendly to speakers of languages outside of English, Chinese [...]
Pingback by Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Bots that talk - December 20, 2007 11:41 am
[...] and future of world languages. When I did a little research on this last fall, I came across an article on the Wikinomics blog that looked at the distribution of languages on the internet and posed questions re language [...]
Pingback by Economics of language & the “long tail” effect | Multidisciplinary perspectives - April 10, 2008 10:44 pm
[...] long tail of language - Part II Back in November my New Paradigm colleague Paul blogged about the impact of the Net on language, in particular noting the massive dominance of information [...]
Pingback by Wikinomics » Blog Archive » The long tail of language - Part II - April 11, 2008 2:01 pm
I predict that Engrish will become the world language in less than 100 years.
Comment by Tel - June 17, 2008 7:09 pm