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Title: The Internet and Languages
[around the year 2000]

Author: Marie Lebert

Release Date: November 8, 2009 [EBook #30422]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INTERNET AND LANGUAGES ***

Produced by Al Haines

THE INTERNET AND LANGUAGES

[around the year 2000]

MARIE LEBERT

NEF, University of Toronto, 2009

Copyright (C) 2009 Marie Lebert. All rights reserved.

TABLE

Introduction
"Language nations" online
Towards a "linguistic democracy"
Encoding: from ASCII to Unicode
First multilingual projects
Online language dictionaries
Learning languages online
Minority languages on the web
Multilingual encyclopedias
Localization and internationalization
Machine translation
Chronology
Websites

INTRODUCTION

It is true that the internet transcends the limitations of time,
distances and borders, but what about languages? Non-English-speaking
internet users reached 50% in July 2000.

# "Language Nations"

"Because the internet has no national boundaries, the organization of
users is bounded by other criteria driven by the medium itself. In
terms of multilingualism, you have virtual communities, for example, of
what I call 'Language Nations'... all those people on the internet
wherever they may be, for whom a given language is their native
language. Thus, the Spanish Language nation includes not only Spanish
and Latin American users, but millions of Hispanic users in the U.S.,
as well as odd places like Spanish-speaking Morocco." (Randy Hobler,
consultant in internet marketing for translation products and services,
September 1998)

# "Linguistic Democracy"

"Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed a human right for every
child in the world by a UNESCO report in the early 1950s, 'mother-
tongue surfing' may very well be the Information Age equivalent. If the
internet is to truly become the Global Network that it is prom