English, The Global Internet Language?

dsplat writes: "Atlantic Monthly has a story about the role of English as a global language. Most of the first two parts would be of interest only to a minority of Slashdot readers. However, the third part concerns the effects of technology on both the spread of English and the very nature of what we call English. It discusses the current uses of Machine Translation, Text to Speech and Speech to Text and the power of connecting the three. It also points out the error rates involved. Nearly every point made in the article was obvious to me, but I have both the background and the interest to follow a lot of it. The beauty of this is that it conveys this information accurately in a way that my parents could follow."

There are a number of interesting links there as well, including one to an interview with David Graddol of The English Company U.K in which he comments:

The type of language switching and word borrowing that typically goes on in any multilingual community is now happening on the Internet on a massive scale, and it is difficult to know what long-term impact this might have on the way the international community will use English.

The main article stated, "As has been widely noted, the Internet, besides being a convenient vehicle for reaching mass audiences such as, say, the citizenry of Japan or Argentina, is also well suited to bringing together the members of small groups -- for example, middle-class French-speaking sub-Saharan Africans." The two comments together paint a picture of various communities across the net infecting each other with their jargon as the members they have in common carry linguistic information with them from place to place on the net. Because the net is notoriously devoid of geographical places, the divisions are solely on the basis of interest and language. Sufficient interest will motivate the transfer of ideas, although I can't see how sufficient fluency will overcome lack of interest. That implies that those people who do not participate in online culture will be the last to adopt the linguistic innovations that spread from here. And conversely, we will adopt their linguistic creations only when they don't attempt to replace one of our own. After all, how many regular Slashdot users mispronounce "Internet" as "Information Superhighway"?

Comments

Well... BASIC English

[aralin]

I am natively speaking Czech/Slovak and my primary and secondary language are German and Russian, but you cannot help it. If you work around computers, you simply HAVE TO learn english. There is no way how to get around it. I have few friends that tried, but either they overcome incredible difficulties or they just gave up. But however english is my third foreign language, it soon became the one that I use most.

There is several reasons why english spread so much, but I think one is really important. You can learn just 3000 words to be able to fully express yourself in most cases. Basic english is something that really helps this language to spread. When you count into it kind of easy grammar...

And I especially like that there are no special symbols, special characters, just all the basic latin characters and thats it. Don't even talk about ease of computer recognition ...

But what I think will move english forward is the fact that more and more 3rd world countries use english as their official language. And these countries are now stepping forward too...

when in rome

[fluxrad]

To be perfectly honest, i think that we're only going to go so far without a global language. As sad as it is for some "other-continenters" to face, english is just slipping into that role. You can argue about how this came about, but it's probably going to continue that way untill the US is no longer the #1 power in the world.

The issue is also this, while the US does not hold a monopoly on goold old DARPA Net, it was the first. and it comes to an argument of "when in rome..." If the internet was created by the spanish and everyone started to adopt that, i'm sure the language of the internet would be Spanish. (This is not to say that the de facto language right now IS english, but for all intents and purposes, english is the beast that rules).

I guess it's just getting annoying that everyone keeps having an argument about why it's so bad that English is becoming the foremost global language. Personally, i'm getting sick of it. Let's just pick a fsckin' language, make sure everyone speaks it (i guess except for people in the south - i still can't figure out what language that is they're speaking), and be on our merry way. If it's english, great...a ton of us already know what one. If not....i'm not lazy, and i'm willing to learn.


FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network

American English

[craw]

Only a putz would think that English is not the defacto language of the internet. Now I know that some of you European prima donnas might think that English looks rather passe when compared vis-a-vis to your rather bizarre languages. You do not have carte blanche to say this.

English is the grande dame of the internet, not some language du jour. English is not a kludge consisting of some funky words that we so irregardlessly made up. English is the Big Kahuna!

If you watch any sci fi...

[garagekubrick]

You'll know that English is the language of the future. How's that? Well it's pretty bloody obvious, aliens speak perfect English too.