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Foreign Policy
Winter 1998–99
www.english-everywhere.com
English was already a major international language in the late 1960s when a handful of scientists at the U.S. Department of Defense began developing the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s network, ARPANET—the forerunner of the Internet. But the explosion of computer networking in the past decade seems to have expanded the reach of English even further.
English has enjoyed several advantages over other languages in cyberspace. The earliest computer operating systems were designed by Americans, who adopted the English alphabet for the first computer character system, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (or ASCII). English remains the only language that can be used without distortion on virtually every computer in the world. The vast majority of the world’s Internet servers—90 percent, according to the Web-consulting firm eMarketer—are still based in English mother-tongue countries. And it is estimated that some 80 percent of all information stored on the world’s computers is in English.
But English’s preeminence might not last long. New software enables Internet users to communicate in everything from German and Arabic to Chinese and Russian. Most Internet browsers now transmit a “language preference” when connecting to remote sites so that they can default to different languages and character systems. The most dramatic change is the growth of the Internet in developing countries. Nua, an Irish Internet consultancy, estimates that while Internet usage in the United States grew 40 percent last year, it grew 200 percent in Brazil, up to 300 percent in India, and over 500 percent in China. By the end of this year, according to eMarketer, Americans will be a minority online.
What does this mean for English? Linguist David Graddol has noted that more than 50 percent of Internet usage in the United States is “local”: e-mail between friends, for example. English’s dominance on the Internet, therefore, should wane as more non-native English speakers go online. Nevertheless, English will likely remain the single most commonly used language on the Internet for the foreseeable future—if only because it remains the world’s most commonly understood one.
—FP