as the year I was really introduced to the web, which was
a little while after its christening but long before it was mainstream.
That was also the year I began my first multilingual web project, and
there was already a significant number of language-related resources
online. This was back before Netscape even existed -- Mosaic was almost
the only web browser, and webpages were little more than hyperlinked
text documents. As browsers and users mature, I don't think there will
be any currently spoken language that won't have a niche on the web,
from Native American languages to Middle Eastern dialects, as well as a
plethora of 'dead' languages that will have a chance to find a new
audience with scholars and others alike online. To my knowledge, there
are very few language types which are not currently online: browsers
currently have the capability to display Roman characters, Asian
languages, the Cyrillic alphabet, Greek, Turkish, and more. Accent
Software has a product called 'Internet with an Accent' which claims to
be able to display over 30 different language encodings. If there are
currently any barriers to any particular language being on the web,
they won't last long. (...)

Online, my work has been with making language information available to
more people through a couple of my web-based projects. While I'm not
multilingual, nor even bilingual, myself, I see an importance to
language and multilingualism that I see in very few other areas. The
internet has allowed me to reach millions of people and help them find
what they're looking for, something I'm glad to do. It has also made me
somewhat of a celebrity, or at least a familiar name in certain circles
-- I just found out that one of my web projects had a short mention in
Time Magazine's Asia and International issues. Overall, I think that
the web has been great for language awareness and cultural issues --
where else can you randomly browse for 20 minutes and run across three
or more different languages with information you might potentially want
to know? Communications mediums make the world smaller by bringing
people closer together; I think that the web is the first (of mail,
telegraph, telephone, radio, TV) to really cross national and cultural
borders for the average person. Israel isn't thousands of miles away
anymore, it's a few clicks away -- our world may now be small enough to
fit inside a computer screen."

How about the future? "I think that the fu