The Language(s) of the Internet

As the web of connectivity booms around the world, Internet cafes are reaching even the most secluded and developing regions of the planet. But how useful is the Web to a Nigerian farmer when over 80 percent of online content is dominated by only 10 major (predominantly Western) languages?

That’s the question raised by scholar Charles Kenny in an article I stumbled upon recently. Writing back in 2002, Kenny explains that only 5 websites on the open Internet existed natively in the Nigerian language of Igbo. None of these sites offered important information services such as news or weather, making it difficult for an Igbo-speaking Web user to engage meaningfully with the Internet.

His broader argument was that we needed to shift our thinking of the digital divide -- originally a question of access -- to concerns over usage. In other words, even if we hooked all of the 20-25 million Igbo-speaking Nigerians to the Web, would they have any Igbo-language information with which to engage? If not, argues Kenny, efforts to breach the digital divide would be futile. But as I read Kenny’s article, I began wondering how things might  have changed since 2002. Is the Web still a monolingual, English-dominated tool? What repercussions might this have on the digital divide?

Not too surprisingly, the language of the Internet has transformed greatly. Take Kenny’s example; back in 2002, he could only find 18 Igbo articles on the Web. Now, Wikipedia alone has over 600 articles written natively in Igbo, and Google offers (admittedly imperfect) translation services to/from local languages including Igbo.

Important services, such as social networking, news and weather, and e-mail, are regularly sprouting up in more obscure languages. Facebook offers its service in over 70 languages, while Google’s search function supports 40. Wikipedia, a potential source of valuable information for farmers, merchants, and schoolchildren in the developing world, is available in nearly 300 languages.

The Internet’s infrastructure  is even being designed to accommodate the non-English world. Back in 2000, ICANN (the global coordinator of domain names and I.P. addresses) introduced the Internationalized Domain Name standard. Starting in 2009, IDN has brought support to 22 international languages, bringing native characters to domains in developing countries like Morocco, Oman, Sri Lanka, Russia, Egypt, and India.

The increase in languages of the developing world on the Internet coincides with the diminishing presence of English on the Web. Back in 1997, 80% of all websites were in English. Now only 27% of all Web users are accessing English sites, while Chinese-language web pages have grown over 1,000% in the past decade to encompass 22% of all websites.

As the global Web turns multilingual, American tech giants “are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to build and develop foreign-language Web sites and services,” reported the New York Times in 2008. Micro-blogging giant Twitter, for example, recently launched the Twitter Translation Center, a tool which asks a corps of users to adapt the company’s site “to make it easier for people around the world to use.” Efforts like these, argues World Wide Web Foundation C.E.O. Steve Bratt, help to spur investment in telecoms in developing countries.

So it’s clear that the linguistic landscape of the Web has diversified immensely since Kenny expressed his concerns back in 2002. But perhaps most pertinently for the digital divide, what happens if your native tongue isn’t one of the 273 offered by Wikipedia? In a world where digital dependency is skyrocketing, are the other 6,000-plus world languages left to bite the dust?

I can’t help but be worried about how the digital divide might be exacerbated in those developing communities whose language won’t end up on the Internet. In a world where economic growth is increasingly linked with ICT usage, it’s more important than ever that important services be supported in native languages. Bridging the digital divide is a complex endeavor in which access and usage are intertwined, and as emphasis grows on the latter, the language(s) of the Internet will have massive repercussions on global development.