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Too much English on Web 'risks crowding out other cultures'

Agence France-Presse
Last updated 11:27pm (Mla time) 11/01/2006

VOULIAGMENI, Greece -- Experts at a UN forum on Internet governance on Wednesday warned that the predominant use of English on the worldwide web needs to be checked before it crowds out other languages.

They fear forms of cultural knowledge accumulated over centuries of human progress could be lost forever.

"Some 90 percent of 6,000 languages (at use today) are not represented on the Internet," said Yoshinori Imai of NHK, Japan's Broadcasting Corporation.

"These people could be left out in the desert of no information and no knowledge," he said.

In countries such as Colombia and Senegal, oral tradition and cultural heritage that could be used for research and education purposes may never reach the broader world, sociologists and linguists told the four-day forum, held in the southern Athens suburb of Vouliagmeni until November 2.

"A large part of the population are voiceless because they cannot share the information," said Adama Samassekou, president of the African Academy of Languages in Mali.

"Every time a language dies, a vision of the world disappears," he said.

"Even in the research field there's a linguistic bias, English is far and away the dominant language," added Divina Frau-Meigs, a professor of media sociology at the University of Sorbonne in Paris.

When it comes to creating sites with non-English content, users in many countries face difficulty in that HTML -- computer language through which web pages are created -- largely uses English words and abbreviations, said Bernard Benhamou, senior lecturer on the information society at the Political Sciences Institute in Paris.

"For (Westerners) this does not mean much, but for a user who doesn't speak English it's a hell of a task," he told Agence France-Presse.

In one case in Cambodia, the local Internet community developed its own software in Khmer after being turned down by a software developer, said Markus Kummer, chairman of the United Nations working group on Internet governance.

For the time being, initiatives to diversify language use on the Internet are undertaken by various countries at local level.

But the United Nations and other organizations such as ICANN, the non-profit organisation that manages the Internet's technical root, are mindful that fragmentation could occur if this issue is not adequately addressed.

If that were ever to happen, experts say that typing an Internet address would produce different links depending on the user's geographical location, while email would get hopelessly lost en route.

"The risk of fragmentation today is low, but if were to occur it would be really bad," said Patrick Faelstroem, a senior consulting engineer at Cisco Systems and a member of the Swedish government's IT policy and strategy group.

"It would mean that if you send me an email from Greece, I may not be able to even reply to you from Sweden," he added.