A Linguistic Revolution?Oavid Crystal

~ingUist can't help but beimpressed by the Internet. It isan extraordinarily diverse medi­

um, holding a mirror up to many sidesof our linguistic nature. The WorldWide Web, in particular, offers a hometo virtually all the styles which have sofar developed in the written language ­newspapers, scientific reports, bulletins,novels, poems, prayers - you name it,you'll find a page on it. Indeed, it isintroducing us to styles of writtenexpression which none of us has everseen before. It has often been said, theInternet is a social revolution - yes,indeed, but it seems to me that it is alsoa linguistic revolution.

I recognize that the Internet is not asingle thing, but consists of severaldomains - e-mails, the World WideWeb, chatrooms (those which exist inreal time and those which do not) and

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the world of fantasy games. Each offersus novel possibilities of human commu­nication which I think can genuinely becalled revolutionary.

In e-mails, what is revolutionary isnot the way some of its users are cavalierabout their typing accuracy, permittingmisspellings, and omitting capitalizationand punctuation. This is a rather minoreffect, which rarely interferes with intel­ligibility. It is patently a special style aris­ing out of the pressures operating onusers of the medium, plus a naturaldesire (especially among younger - oryounger-minded - users) to be idiosyn­cratic and daring. And that is how it isperceived. If I receive an e-mail fromSmith in which he mis-spells a word, Ido not conclude from this that 'Smith

can't spell'. I simply conclude that hewas in a hurry. I know this because I dothe same thing myself, when I am in a

hurry. There is nothingtruly revolutionary here.

What is revolution­

ary about e-mails is thcway the medium per­mits what IS called

framing. You receive amessage which con­tains, say, three differ­ent points in a singleparagraph. You can, ifyou want, reply toeach of these pointsby taking the para­graph, splitting it upinto three parts, andthen responding toeach part separately,so that the messageyou send back thenlooks a bit like a playdialogue. Then, yoursender can do the

same thing to yourresponses, and whenyou get the messageback, you see hisreplies to yourreplies. You canthen send the lot onto someone else forfurther comments,and when it comes

back, there arenow three voicesframed on thescreen. And so it

can go on - replieswithin replieswithin replies ­and all unified

within the same screen typography.There's never been anything like this inthe history of human written commu­nication.

The pages of the Web offer a differ­ent kind of revolutionary development.The one thing we can say about tradi­tional writing is that it is permanent.You open a book at page 6, close thebook, then open it at page 6 again. Youexpect to see the same thing. You wouldbe more than a little surprised if the

page had changed in the interim. Butthis kind of impermanence is perfectlynormal on the vVeb - where indeed youcan see the page changing in front ofyour eyes. vVords appear and disappear,in varying colours. Sentences slide ontothe screen and off again. Letters dancearound. The vVeb is truly part of a new,animated linguistic channel - moredynamic than traditional writing, andmore permanent than traditionalspeech. It is neither speech nor writing.It is part of a new medium.

A cocktail party of messagesReal-time Internet discussion groupschatrooms - also offer a revolutionaryset of possibilities. You see on yourscreen messages coming in from all overthe world. If there are 30 people in theroom, then you could be seeing 30 dif­ferent messages, all making various con­tributions to the theme, but often clus­tering into half a dozen or more sub­conversations. It's like being in a cock­tail party where there are other conver­sations going on all around you. In theparty, of course, you can't pay attentionto them. In a chatroom you can't avoidthem. It has never been possible before,in the history of human communication,to "listen" to 30 people at once. Nowyou can. J\iloreover, you can respond toas many of them as your mental powersand typing speed permit. This too is arevolutionary state of afIairs, as far asspeech is concerned.

But there's a further reason for the

revolutionary status of the Internet - thef~lCtthat it offers a home to all languages- as soon as their communities have a

functioning computer technology, ofcourse. Its increasingly multilingualcharacter has been the most notable

change since it started out - not verylong ago - as a totally English medium.There's a story the former US vice-pres­ident AI Gore tells. He was reportingthe remark of the 8-year-old son ofKyrgyzstan's President Akayev, who toldhis father that he had to learn English.

When asked why, the child apparentlyreplied: "Because, daddy, the computerspeaks English."

For many, indeed, the language ofthe Internet "is" English. There was aheadline in The New Yorle Times in 1996which said simply: "World, Wide, Web:3 English Words". The article, byMichael Specter, went on to say: "If youwant to take full advantage of theInternet there is only one real way to doit: learn English". He did acknowledgethe arrival of other languages: "As theWeb grows", he said, "the number ofpeople on it who speak French, say, orRussian will become more varied andthat variety will be expressed on theWeb. That is why it is a fundamentallydemocratic technology", he said, "but itwon't necessarily happen soon."

Well, the evidence is growing thatthis conclusion was wrong. With theInternet's globalization, the presence ofother languages has steadily risen. Bythe mid-1990s, a widely quoted figurewas that about 80% of the Net was inEnglish. This figure derived fi-om thefirst major study of language distribu­tion on the Internet, carried out in 1997by Babel, a joint initiative of theInternet Society and Alis Technologies.This showed English well ahead, butwith several other languages enteringthe ring - notably German, Japanese,French, and Spanish.

Since then, the estimates for Englishhave been steadily falling. Some com­mentators are now predicting that beforelong the Web (and the Internet as awhole) will be predominantly non­English, as communications infrastruc­ture develops in Europe, Asia,Afi-ica,andSouth America. A recent Global Reachsurvey estimated that people withInternet access in non-English-speakingcountries increased betwccn 1995 and2000 fi-om 7 m.illion to 136 million. In1998, there was another surprise: thenumber of newly created Web sites not inEnglish passed the total for newly createdsites that were in English. And at a con­ference on Search Engine Strategies inLondon in 2000, a representative of AltaVista was predicting that by the end of2002 less than 50% of the Web would bein English. In certain parts ofthe world,the local language is already dominant.According to one Japanese Internetauthor, YoshiMikami, 90% of Web pagesin Japan are already in Japanese.

Spend an hour hunting for languageson the World Wide Web and you'll findhundreds. In 2001 I spent a few daystracking down as many examples as Icould find, for my book Language andthe Internet. I found one site, calledWorld Language Resources, which listsproducts for 728 languages. I found anAfrican resource list which covered sev­eral local languages; Yoruba, for exam­ple, was illustrated by some 5000 words,along with proverbs, naming patternsand greetings. Another site dealt with

no less than 87 European minority lan­guages. Some of the sites were very smallin content, of course, but nonethelessextensive in range: one gave the Lord'sPrayer in nearly 500 languages.

Over 1000 languages on the WebNobody has yet worked out just howmany languages have obtained a mod­icum of presence on the Web. I foundover 1000 quite quicldy. It's not difficultto find evidence of a Net presence for allthe more frequently used languages inthe world, and for a large number ofminority languages too. I'd guess thatabout a quarter of the world's languages- that's about 1500 - have some sort ofcyber existence now.

It's important to point out that in allthese examples I'm tallcingabout languagepresence in a real sense. These aren't siteswhich only analyseor talk about languages,from the point of view of linguistics orsome other academicsubject. They're siteswhich allowus to see languages as they are.In many cases, the total Web presence, interms of number of pages, is quite small.The crucial point is that the languages areout there, even if they're represented byonly a sprinkling of sites.

The Internet is the ideal medium forminority languages. If you are a speal(eror supporter of an endangered language ­an aboriginal language, say,or one of theCeltic languages - you're keen to give thelanguage some publicity, to draw its plightto the attention of the world. Previously,this was very difficult to do. It was hardto attract a newspaper article on the sub­ject, and the cost of a newspaper adver­tisement was prohibitive. It was virtuallyimpossible to get a radio or television pro­gramme devoted to it. But now, WitllWeb pages and e-mail waiting to be used,you can get your message out in next tono time, in your own language - with atranslation as well, if you want - and infront of a global audience whose potentialsize mal(es traditional media audienceslook minuscule by comparison. Chatrooms, moreover, are a boon to speakersliving in isolation from each other, as nowthere can be a virtual speech communityto which they can belong.

... a magic momentOn the other hand, I have to recognizethat developing a significant cyber-pres­ence for a language is not casy. There'sa sort of 'critical mass' of Internet pene­u-ation which has to build up in a coun­try, before a language develops a vibrantcyber-life. It's not much use, really, tohave just one or two sites in a locallan­guage on the Web. People wanting touse or find out about the languagewould soon get bored. The number ofsites has to build up until, suddenly,everybody's using them and adding tothem and talking about them. That's amagic moment, and only a few hundredlanguages have so far reached it. In thejargon of the Internet, there needs to be

lots of good 'content' in the locallan­guages out there, and until there is, peo­ple will stay using the languages thathave managed to accumulate content ­English, in particular.

So the character of a multilingualInternet isn't entirely clear. It will alldepend on how quicldy new sites canbuild up a local language momentum.There are also a number of practical diffi­culties. Until quite recently there werereal problems in using the characters ofthe keyboard to cope with the alphabeti­cal diversity of the world's languages.Because it was the English alphabet tllatwas the standard, only a very few non­English accents and diacritics could behandled. If it was a foreign word withsome strange-looking accent marks, theInternet software would simply ignoretllem, and assume they weren't impor­tant. This can still happen - but thingshave moved on a great deal since then.First, the basic set of keyboard characters,tlle so-called ASCII set, was extended, sotllat the commoner non-English diacrit­ics could be included. But even then itonly allowed up to 256 characters - andthere are far more letter shapes in theworld than that. Just think of tlle array ofshapes you find in Arabic, Hindi,Chinese, Korean, and the many otherlanguages which don't use tlle Latinalphabet. Today, a new coding system,the UNICODE system, is much moresophisticated: in its latest version it allowsthe representation on screen of over94,000 characters - but that's still wellshort ofthe total number of written char­acters in all the world's languages, whichhave been estimated to be c.175,000.

My feeling is that the future looksgood for Web multilingualism, and anumber of influential people seem toshare this view. Ned Thomas, forinstance, is editor of a bulletin calledContact - the quarterly publication ofthe European Bureau of Lesser UsedLanguages. In an editorial in 2000 hesaid: "It is not the case ... that all lan­guages will be marginalized on the Netby English. On the contrary, there willbe a great demand for multilingual Websites, for multilingual data retrieval, formachine translation, for voice recogni­tion systems to be multilingual." AndTyler Chambers, the creator of variousWeb language projects, agrees: "Thefuture of the Internet", he says, "is evenmore multilingual ism and cross-culturalexploration and understanding thanwe've already seen." I concur. The Weboffers a World Wide Welcome for globallinguistic diversity. And in an era whenso many languages of the world aredying (estimates suggest that half theworld's languages will have disappearedby the end of this century), such opti­mism is truly revolutionary.

David Crystal OBE is an internationallyrenowned writeJS fournal editor, lecturerand broadcaster.

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