ample, 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."

= [Text]

At first, the internet was nearly 100% English. A network was set up by
the Pentagon in 1969, before spreading to U.S. governmental agencies
and universities from 1974 onwards, after Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn
invented TCP/IP (transmission control protocol / internet protocol).
After the creation of the World Wide Web in 1989-90 by Tim Berners-Lee
at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva,
Switzerland, and the distribution of the first browser Mosaic, the
ancestor of Netscape, from November 1993 onwards, the internet really
took off, first in the U.S. and Canada, then worldwide.

Why did the internet spread in North America first? The U.S. and Canada
were leading the way in computer science and communication technology,
and a connection to the internet, mainly through a phone line at the
time, was much cheaper than in most countries. In Europe, avid internet
users needed to navigate the web at night, when phone rates by the
minute were cheaper, to cut their expenses. In 1998, some French,
Italian and German users were so fed up with the high rates that they
launched a movement to boycott the internet one day per week, for
internet providers and phone companies to set up a special monthly rate
for them. This paid off, and providers began to offer monthly "internet
rates".

In the 1990s, the percentage of English decreased from nearly 100% to
80%. People from all over the world began to have access to the
internet, and to post more and more webpages in their own languages.

The first major study about language distribution on the web was run by
Babel, a joint initiative from Alis Technologies, a company
specializing in language translation services, and the Internet
Society. The results were published in June 1997 on a webpage named
"Web Languages Hit Parade". The main languages were English with 82.3%,
German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%, Spanish with
1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.

In "Web Embraces Language Translation", an article published in ZDNN
(ZDNetwork News) on 21 July 1998, Martha L. Stone explained: "Thi