Abstract
Abstract This article provides an overview on some of the key aspects that relate to the co-evolution of languages and its associated content in the Internet environment. A focus on such a co-evolution is pertinent as the evolution of languages in the Internet environment can be better understood if the development of its existing and emerging content, that is, the content in the respective language, is taken into consideration. By doing so, this article examines two related aspects: the governance of languages at critical sites of the Internet environment, including ICANN, Wikipedia and Google Translate. Following on from this examination, the second part outlines how the co-evolution of languages and associated content in the Internet environment extends policy-making related to linguistic pluralism. It is argued that policies which centre on language availability in the Internet environment must shift their focus to the dynamics of available content instead. The notion of language pairs as a new regime of intersection for both languages and content is discussed to introduce an extended understanding of the uses of linguistic pluralism in the Internet environment. The ultimate extrapolation of such an enhanced approach, it is argued, centres less on 6,000 languages but, instead, on 36 million language pairs. This article describes how such a powerful resource evolves in the Internet environment.
Highlights
The foundational structure of the Internet as well as the World Wide Web was anything other than multi-language compatible in the beginning
The more language pairs on Google Translate, the more content becomes available to speakers of supported languages, without the user even being consciously aware of the act of translation and its impact on the original text
With the 3,306 language pairs Google Translate offers, and the current status of Wikipedia‘s inter-language links in terms of inter-translatability, it is reasonable to conclude that we are only beginning to see this new kind of content globalisation evolving
Summary
The foundational structure of the Internet as well as the World Wide Web was anything other than multi-language compatible in the beginning. Berners-Lee‘s statement reflects the lingual origin of the World Wide Web. invented and proposed in the French part of multilingual Switzerland, at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), it was American English that was dominant in the most common codes of the computer and inter-computer (Internet) environments at that time. (United Nations/ITU 1999; Viard and Economides 2010) Language availability requires the technical implementation of characters, scripts and writing systems in major operating systems, web standards, devices such as mobile phones, and so on This is aided by political and cultural support which may evolve from public pressure by governments and interest groups, or the use of popular culture, for example. A thorough understanding is required of the regimes that regulate how languages (scripts) come into existence at critical sites of the Internet environment
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