on forums on my
website, Windows on Haiti, held exclusively in Kreyol. One is for
general discussions on just about everything but obviously more focused
on Haiti's current socio-political problems. The other is reserved only
to debates of writing standards for Kreyol. Those debates have been
quite spirited and have met with the participation of a number of
linguistic experts. The uniqueness of these forums is their non-
academic nature."

Robert Beard, co-founder of the yourDictionary.com portal, wrote in
January 2000: "While English still dominates the web, the growth of
monolingual non-English websites is gaining strength with the various
solutions to the font problems. Languages that are endangered are
primarily languages without writing systems at all (only 1/3 of the
world's 6,000+ languages have writing systems). I still do not see the
web contributing to the loss of language identity and still suspect it
may, in the long run, contribute to strengthening it. More and more
Native Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to
write grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries. For
these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression."

LOCALIZATION AND INTERNATIONALIZATION

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Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central Library at
the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), wrote
in August 1999: "I think it is incumbent on European organizations and
businesses to try and offer websites in three or four languages if
resources permit. In this age of globalization and electronic commerce,
businesses are finding that they are doing business across many
countries. Allowing French, German, Japanese speakers to easily read
one's website as well as English speakers will give a business a
competitive edge in the domain of electronic trading."

= [Text]

In 1999, the subtitle of Babel's website was: "Towards communicating on
the internet in any language..." Babel was a joint project from Alis
Technologies and the Internet Society to contribute to the
internationalization of the internet. Babel offered a multilingual
website (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and
Swedish), with information about the world's languages, and a
typographical and linguistic glossary. "The Internet and
Multilingualism" section gave information on how to develop a
multilingual website, and how to code the "world's writing