Maori,
Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute, wrote in
September 1998 in an email interview: "Although English is still the
most important language used on the web, and the internet in general, I
believe that multilingualism is an inevitable part of the future
direction of cyberspace. Here are some of the important developments
that I see as making a multilingual web become a reality:

1. <Popularization of information technology.> Computer technology has
traditionally been the sole domain of a 'techie' elite, fluent in both
complex programming languages and in English -- the universal language
of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle
writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII. There wasn't
much room for anything other than the 26 letters of the English
alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't even recognize
acute accents and umlauts -- not to mention non-alphabetic systems like
Chinese. But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been
popularized. GUIs (graphical user interfaces) like Windows and
Macintosh have hastened the process (and indeed it's no secret that it
was Microsoft's marketing strategy to use their operating system to
make computers easy to use for the average person). These days this
ease of use has spread beyond the PC to the virtual, networked space of
the internet, so that now non-programmers can even insert Java applets
into their webpages without understanding a single line of code.

2. <Competition for a chunk of the 'global market' by major industry
players.> An extension of (local) popularization is the export of
information technology around the world. Popularization has now
occurred on a global scale and English is no longer necessarily the
lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua franca, but
only the individual languages of the users. One thing is certain -- it
is no longer necessary to understand English to use a computer, nor it
is necessary to have a degree in computer science. A pull from non-
English-speaking computer users and a push from technology companies
competing for global markets has made localization a fast growing area
in software and hardware development. This development has not been as
fast as it could have been. The first step was for ASCII to become
Extended ASCII. This meant that computers could begin to start
recognizing the accent