The Internet in “Their” Language: South Korea and the Internationalizing Web

Abstract

Abstract For most of the World Wide Web's history, Web developers and users have been restricted to the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) to create and access websites by title/Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Over roughly the last fifteen years, an international group of hardware and software experts, coordinated in part by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has created a workaround that allows for top-level Web domain names to be writable and readable in character sets other than ASCII, including Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Greek. But rather than prompting a discrete switch from one dominant language (English) to many, this development has prompted increasing linguistic complexity as internationalized sites include both English and more regional/local languages to fulfill rhetorical purposes. This article extends earlier research on Web internationalization and multilingualism by focusing on South Korea, which is simultaneously highly Internet connected and highly monolingual. Genre and linguistic analysis of three websites in Korean domains reveals language contact across “content” and “functional” areas in website layouts. Analysis suggests ongoing work across computing devices as well as research using diverse methodologies.