The Internet... good news or bad for language?

The Internet is an American juggernaut, an irresistible force churning over the Earth's surface, crushing languages and cultures as it propels English to world domination.

So say some pundits. Anglophones (English-speakers) eager to skip the intellectual challenge of learning other languages applaud. But is it true?

That the Net is mostly an American invention is undeniable. With few exceptions (Internet Relay Chat [IRC], the original online chat system, was developed in Finland), anglophones built the invisible empire we call cyberspace. Practically everything online is in English. Search engines, web pages, databases, chats, Suite 101... even this editorial questioning the supremacy of English on the Web, is in English.

Conclusion: the Net is an English-only zone. Speak English or get out.

This thesis was recently advanced by a (unilingual) friend. He makes a good case. His argument is extremely popular in some circles, nowhere more than the United States. Unfortunately, he's wrong.

The delusion that everything on the Web is in English is rooted in a crippling visual handicap of unilingual anglophones. "The other side" of the Internet is all but invisible to them. Because they can only search for English words or phrases, they conclude that the hits they get are all that's available on the World Wide Web. If they get no hits, they conclude that the information isn't available. "I don't speak another language," say some , "because everything I need is in English." That's an obvious fallacy. How do you know if something is useful if you can't even see it? .

Multilingual cybernauts, on the other hand, enjoy a much bigger, more colourful, more diverse Internet. Consider the bilingual person searching for turnip recipes. She goes to Yahoo, enters the words "turnip" and "recipe." She gets a dozen hits, all in English, most of them unhelpful. If she were unilingual, her search would end there. Fortunately, she holds the key to a sort of parallel universe, to borrow a science-fiction metaphor. Entering "navet" and "recette," she sees a few French-language sites pop up. She saves a little more text, then dumps Yahoo entirely in favour of a French-language search engine. Dozens more pages spill onto her screen, all in French, many containing turnip recipes. These sites are inaccessible to linguistically-challenged users. Yahoo doesn't even list them. Our bilingual surfer's Internet is a richer, more helpful place.

The fact is, there's a vast "shadow web" of online resources and services available only in other languages. I use many of them in my work. They contain information I can't get in English, and give me a distinct edge over unilingual competitors.

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