Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Shifts East
Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article discussing the World Intellectual Property Organization's prediction that in less than 10 years, Chinese will be the most widely-used language on the web. Assuming the Internet becomes a truly global entity, this is an obvious (and mathematically correct) conclusion. On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'? And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
While the content produced will increasingly come in many different languages as we move forward over the next few years, I still see little movement on the actual programming front.
.. which ends up meaning that he/she also must understand English, thereby limiting the scope of the Web to those who at least have a passing knowledge of English.
Today, 99% of all programming is still done in English which ends up giving a definite bias towards English as the language of the web.
If someone comes out with some programming language that can be programmed in local languages and which gets popular, that is when I see a real shift happening in the base of the web. Otherwise, the content producer still ends up embedding their original language content inside English HTML
The idea that Chinese will be the predominant language on the web is absurd.
China, despite recent moves towards a more open, capitalist society, has a problem that wont go away. Saw an interesting program on PBS a few months ago that discussed how China has changed in the past 50 years. Basically, you have a situation these days where the gap between the upper class and lower class is insanely wide. The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population. Meanwhile, the bulk of China's population are subsistance farmers who aren't allowed to even BE in (let alone conduct business in) China's main citiies. In most of these rural areas, electric power and indoor plumbing are considered high tech luxuries. Infact, China's national telecom infrastructure is considerably less extensive than most states in the U.S.
China's on the move, yes, but they have a looooooooooooong long way to go before their influence on the Internet becomes anywhere near as large as Europe's or America's influence.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Numbers alone aren't significant, if they were Chinese (which, as the article points out, has so many speakers) would be the quasi-official language of multinational business, travel, etc..Right? But it isn't...English is. My point isn't to praise English (which in many ways is a very stupid language, technically), but just point out that the numbers only tell a very small part of the story. I won't even bother to point out that many of these Chinese speakers who get on the net will be in no position to contribute much to the global economy in terms of buying goods for import, etc, due to political and economical roadblocks.
Well duh... sorry, that sounds rather america-centric. Do you really expect everyone else to learn english so you don't have to learn anything else?
Actually, yes I do. English speakers, whether or not that was the mother tongue of all the individuals involved, after all, developed practically all the technology involved. English is the lingua franca of international commerce. Air traffic control and hotel concierges all over the world speak English. Engineers in many disciplines use English terminology, even if the rest of their communication is in their native language, and international academic journals are published in English. Esperanto was a nice idea (I even learnt basic conversation in it once) but English, with maybe French (which I speak, altho' not fluently) or Spanish for backup, is the de facto common tongue, and will enable you to travel or to business almost anywhere in the world. Remember that English is not a static language, it freely adopts words and phrases from other languages as required. It can be both precise and expressive, as required.
Maybe (relatively) few Chinese speak English, but relatively few Chinese even speak to non-Chinese at all. That country is not a cultural and linguistic "melting pot" like the US or UK, it is remarkably homogenous for such a large country. The question really is, will the Chinese become like us, or will they choose an isolationist policy? And don't forget, Chinese characters are available on computers at all because Western corporations decided that they should be - we are being as accomodating as we possibly can! If the Chinese want their own information infrastructure, they are free to create it for themselves - or they can choose to use ours, which we are making available freely. Why is America always the bad guy in cultural discussions?
Besides, there are purely technical reasons why English is a "better" language than Chinese for computing - look at the numbers of characters in the alphabets, for example. English words are distinct, Chinese ideograms are much more dependent on context and the interpretation of the listener.
There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.
In Australia for example, it is significantly more expensive to be fully on the net - we're looking at 15 to 23 cents per received megabyte of data, and they're marketting megabytes (10e6 bytes). If one is happy with a proxied web service and a server-free presence, then for $80 a month one can download 3 gigabytes or more over ADSL.
Look, you can learn what 'color' and 'font' mean without knowing the rest of it. And almost all localization schemes still allow you to type in the roman space.
.. as a package name).
So while yeh, some things will be intuitive for English speakers, particularly things like APIs. while "font" might be easy javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo (of course, Java does in fact allow Unicode for variable and class names, so you could have like
So, for a while I think most actual coding will be done in English, but that doesn't mean most website content will be. You could always have one web guy and one content guy as well. Or, for example you could use off the self software and fill it with localized content, (for example slashdot.jp).
And lets not forget, Ruby, a programming language quickly gaining popularity was actually crated in Japan, where it's now more popular then Perl.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Don't forget India. (and Pakistan). Both have large English speaking populations (as a second language for a lot of people, though) India, in fact, uses English in the government. I'm not sure about Pakistan though.
Of course, unlike the US, England, etc, India has lots of native languages as well.
Oh, one other thing. All Chinese students need to have minimum competency in English in order to get into collage. More people may speak Chinese well, but English is really starting to become a sort of lingua fracia. Of course, soon enough instant translation will take over and the idea of learning another language will be a quaint little hobby.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.