Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2006

Recent research on sociolinguistics has shown that while the Internet is potentially a multilingual environment where users from different parts of the world can communicate and share information, the way that the Internet is structured makes access more difficult for users who are unfamiliar with the Roman alphabet. To promote language equality within Cyberspace and to encourage such people to use the Internet, a proposal for internationalised domain names (IDN) has been developed. We examine how far this and other proposals meet the needs of all types of Internet users. In the light of our findings, we describe an alternative approach which uses an intelligent URL search engine to enable users to access the Internet using their own language. We have tested our implemented prototype on a small sample of data. The results suggest that our approach provides a viable means of encouraging language diversity on the Internet by overcoming the language barrier posed by conventional Internet addresses.

This paper reports on research sponsored by Unesco to provide reliable data on the extent to which the WWW is becoming a means for minority language groups to publish information and reach the general public. These are the first findings of what is intended to be a world wide enquiry. We report on the Web presence of a group of European languages, all of which have minority status in the states in which they are spoken. They are various dialects of Occitan3 in France, Sardinian, Piemontese and Ladin in Italy and Frisian in the Netherlands. The research confirms that these languages are used extensively on the Internet. However, it also finds that the domains in which they are used are quite restricted and mirror to a large degree the situation in traditional print publishing. Thus the WWW may only be having an influence on volume of publishing and is not necessarily extending the use of the languages to new areas. Thirdly, it records substantial publishing by private individuals and finds that there are possible consequences here for standardisation of minority languages. The research is comparative and ongoing and will explore whether the European situation is typical or exceptional.

This paper reports on the process of searching with Irish words on the Irish language version of the Google Internet search engine. Five words from ‘typical’ and ‘non-typical’ domains for Irish are used, and the results are analysed in terms of the “authenticity” of the search process and results, the language usage in the sites found through the search process, and the domains represented by the results. The study identifies a number of problems encountered when searching for results in a ‘small’ language. It also indicates that the ‘official’ sector and other sectors closely related to language policy and planning are the main providers of monolingual Irish texts on the Internet, with a variety of mixed Irish and English approaches favoured by other providers.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, divides the World Wide Web geographically, assigning country suffixes to states to be used in web addresses for sites on their territory. This paper reports on the campaign in Catalonia to have the right to use .ct as the territorial domain name for sites in Catalonia. The bid has been countered by the central government in Madrid and the argument is ongoing. In the interim, ICANN have assigned the .cat suffix. This recognises the linguistic, cultural and ethnic group as a web entity without going as far as to give them the same web standing as a sovereign state.

This article analyses the European Union’s Futurum discussion forum. The EU hoped that Futurum would help close the acknowledged gap between institutions and citizens by facilitating a virtual, multilingual, transnational public sphere. Futurum was both an interesting example of how the EU’s language policies shape the structure of deliberative experiments and of a public debate about their relative value. We combine various quantitative measures of the discussions with a critical discourse analysis of a thread which focused on language policies. We found that although the debates were predominantly in English, where a thread started in a language other than English, linguistic diversity was more prominent. The discourse analysis showed that multilingual interaction was fostered, and that the debate about language policies is politically and ideologically charged.

After Robert Phillipson argued in Linguistic Imperialism (1992) that the present spread of English throughout post-colonial societies is a specific form of Western imperialism, a vigorous academic debate ensued. It revolved around several interrelated questions: How do different languages interact in the global arena?; Is such language competition a manifestation of imperialism or of globalisation?; What are the social implications of language growth and of language decline/death?; etc. The present article is a critique of the debate and an attempt to develop a positivist, systemic, macro-level theory of language competition, which would offer a general framework for dealing with the issues in question.