Cyber-geography of languages
Part 1: method, results and focus on English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/irie488Keywords:
Cyber-Geography of languages, Multilingualism, Linguistic Diversity, Disinformation, Cultural Diversity, BiasAbstract
The methodology, sources, biases and results of the recent study of the Observatory of Linguistic and Cultural Diversity on the Internet, for the creation of indicators of the presence on the Internet of the 330 languages with more than one million L1 speakers, are presented. It appears that the languages of Europe, and especially English, are still dominating the Internet but that the languages of Asia and the Arabic world are in a strong progression and will take the lead, first in terms of connected speakers (part 2 develops this point). The case of English is focused to demonstrate that its share of the Internet keeps declining to reach now 25%, despite some kind of mediatic disinformation placing it above 50% by trusting sources that do not pay due attention to multilingualism. The lingua franca of the Internet is translation, the indispensable crutch of multilingualism.
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