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?"
Mod parent down.
<A HREF="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=chin
You don't see the goatse.cx bit in the status bar, because the spaces push it off the right of your screen. Pretty clever, even if it is stealing an idea from another story!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Errr....Taiwan was created by China as an experiment, and China still claims sovereignty over it. They certainly didn't look to Taiwan as an example.
Cheers,
Ian
And don't forget that all new websites will be named by throwing silverware down the stairs.
I disagree with both methodology and the result of the prediction. As to methodology - I cannot offer anything better ;-)
But result is also wrong. AFAIK (sorry, no URL) India is the second population/growth-population wise country in the world. Therefor "indian" is then supposed to be the second language to be used on the web in the future. But the problem is that there is no such language as "indian". There are plenty of dialects instead, which make English a unifying language for India. Now, I guess we should add all those native English speakers to all those Indian netters, then we add all those who consider English to be international language, and I would say that English is the winner over Chineese.
Also, Chineese is difficult to learn, multi-byte, different direction language, which makes it absolutely not convinient for Internet usage.
Taking "real--time cool translators" unknown out of equation, my bet would be on English.
Leonid Mamtchenkov