English
could snowball on Net
By
Ted Smalley Bowen,
Technology Research NewsThe Internet’s ability to connect a wide range of cultures would seem to bode well for diversity of all sorts.
But, while the technology is relatively neutral, the influences of political and economic power have made the Internet a virtual English-language empire.
Researchers from the Tel Aviv University and the University of California at Berkeley have teamed up to gauge the nature of the relationship between linguistic patterns and Internet content.
Early returns from the work imply that English content will continue to dominate the Internet, although other studies predict different scenarios.
Currently about 70 percent of Internet content is in English, but only about 44 percent of Internet users are native English speakers. Worldwide, native Spanish speakers outnumber native English speakers, and the number of native Chinese speakers more than equals that of both groups. English dominates online because it was established early on as the lingua franca of the wired world.
The imbalance reflects a first-mover advantage that is common in networks of all kinds, according to Neil Gandal, an associate professor of economics at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
In this case, the language of Shakespeare, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Yogi Berra benefits from the snowballing effect of a popular medium attracting more users simply because it’s popular. The language's popularity spurs more people to learn English, which increases incentives for content providers to cater to an English-speaking audience, which in turn makes it all the more popular.
The researchers examined whether these first-mover effects dictate that English will simply gain momentum and remain the primary online language, prompting even more people to learn it, or whether the demographic and economic realities of a polyglot world will turn the tide.
This question is especially pertinent because Internet use among non-native English speakers is growing at a faster rate than that of native English speakers. By 2003 only 29 percent of Web users will be native English speakers, according to one estimate.
The researchers analyzed the surfing habits of a usefully bilingual population -- Canadians in the province of Québec. As of 1996, roughly 5.7 million Québec citizens counted French as their mother tongue, about 600,000 cited English, and about 60,000 listed both.
The researchers looked at users’ overall time online and time spent at each of seven types of sites: retail, business and finance; entertainment, news, sports and technology; education; portals, searches and directories; services, including ISPs, careers, and hobbies; government; and adult.
To get a rough breakdown by language of the content surfed, the researchers wrote a spider program that identified the languages of the approximately 40,000 Quebecois URL domains visited.
The researchers compared the overall Internet use of the three linguistic camps by type of sites, regardless of the content language, and then looked at which factors determined the percent of the time devoted to English language sites.
The native English speakers visited English content sites 87 percent of the time and stayed online about 35 percent longer than their French-speaking neighbors. The native French speakers, however, surfed in English a still considerable 64 percent of the time.
The differences also narrowed with age: younger native French speakers looked at more English content than their elders.
The finding that native French speakers are hurdling the linguistic barrier and turning to English sites for content not available in French is evidence that English's first-mover advantage is still snowballing, according to Gandal. These network effects are likely to continue to favor creating content in English and to lower incentives to do so in French, he said.
These preliminary results also indicate that the Internet is increasing the incentive for non-native English speakers to learn English as a second language, which could in turn promote English as a global language, according to Gandal.
In addition, although automatic translation technologies may eventually break down linguistic barriers, they are currently too limited to be a likely influence on the choice of content language, said Gandal. “Translation is very difficult because of the subtlety involved in the use of language," he said.
Computer-generated translation does work well for finding simple information like a train or airline schedule or the location of a particular office, but does not convey more complicated communications like disease diagnosis or an explanation of how to make a retail purchase, said Gandal. "We don’t think that they will play a prominent role in the choice of language content in the foreseeable future."
The issue of language representation on the Internet is a contentious one, and is complicated by widespread financial stakes and cultural implications. The researchers' conclusions contradict those of the Foundation for Networks and Development, a private regional development organization in the Dominican Republic.
The current predominance of English on the Internet is largely due to the network's American origins and because the first wave of users worldwide is more likely to speak English as a second language, said Daniel Pimienta, director of the Foundation.
The foundation's statistics show that this is changing, he said. For instance, three years ago 75 percent of Web pages were in English, but that number has dropped to 50 percent today. In addition, the number of English Web pages as a percentage of the population of the world that speaks English as a native or second language is falling relative to Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, he said.
As the Internet's population becomes more diverse and an increasing percentage of its users lack English skills, the early predominance of English will continue to fade, he said. "As the Internet evolves toward a more balanced geographical [distribution] and a more balanced socio-economic distribution, the dominance of English will more and more appear as a transitional phenomenon and the representation of language in the Net will tend to become closer to the natural representation of the language in the world."
As this happens, however, English will retain a special role in bridging communities whose native languages are different, he added. "This is and will remain the case of English, but also of Spanish, French, Arabic and Chinese."
Under this scenario, monolingual native English speakers may be more likely to pick up another tongue, Pimienta said. "The Internet will probably represent a strong asset for the language training industry to add a second language to native English speakers."
The Tel Aviv and Berkeley team's choice of a mostly bilingual population like Quebec's makes it harder to gauge the factors driving the choice of language on the Internet, Pimienta said. That population is able to navigate in English, while 90% of the world population does not understand English, he said.
The Tel Aviv and Berkeley researchers are currently working on a model designed to distinguish among cultural and economic factors driving the spread of English and those effects specific to the Internet, Gandal said.
One goal is finding how closely the use of English online will hew to the demographic and economic realities of English speakers. “The question is whether the percent of Internet content in English will reflect... or... greatly exceed the percentage of native English speakers around the world, weighted by purchasing power,” said Gandal.
The researchers plan to delve into data for all of Canada in an effort to quantify factors like the number of Internet pages read or transactions conducted that would justify continued use of and investment in a particular language, Gandal said. “The model will need to distinguish between adults who find it harder to learn a new language... and children who find it easier," and therefore get more out of the experience, he said.
The researchers' updated model will also help quantify the strong network effects favoring development in English and drawing the best bells and whistles to English sites which, at least initially, place non-English sites at a disadvantage.
As more precise language identification software emerges, the researchers will be better able to determine the breakdown of pages visited according to content language, according to Gandal.
Gandal's research associate was Carl Shapiro of the University of California at Berkeley. They presented the work last month at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) 29th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy in Alexandria, Virginia. The research was funded by the UC Berkeley.
Timeline: Now
Funding: University
TRN Categories: Internet, linguistics
Story Type: News
Related Elements: Technical paper, “The effect of native language on Internet usage”, Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) 29th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy, October 27-29, 2001, Alexandria, Virginia. >
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November 21, 2001
Page One
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English could snowball on Net
Page age shapes Web
Circuits show six degrees of separation
Spot of gold makes tiny transistor
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