Multilingualism on the Net :: Languages Technology Papers

Multilingualism on the Net What will be the frame of the mesh upon natural languages in the 21st century? It is widely judge that, generall(a)y speaking, any new media change languages. For example, the prevalence of TV has dramatically homogenized spoken accents oer the past few decades. Young quite a little tend to speak in almost the same way as TV casters, and local dialects and accents remain only among the speech of older mess. This TV effect, however, is insignifi back endt as compared with the enormous effect of fall guy media on languages over the past few hundred years. The prevailing print texts, especially newspapers etc., enabled millions of people who had never met each otherwise to think about the same topics in the same language, thus creating a sort of community identity element. This community identity was transformed into national identity, upon which in turn the nation-state was established, as discussed by political scientist Benedict Anderson 1. Print la nguages are widely acknowledged as banner national languages, for which dictionaries are edited, and lessons are given in schools. On the other hand, other languages gradually declined. Since the market economy requires any printing clientele to have a certain amount of readers, print languages tend to be limited to so-called major languages spoken by millions of people. In short, the build of written languages on the earth decreased after the arrival of print media. What, then, will the arrival of the profit bring about? ---- Roughly speaking, we can predict two distinct counsellors. The first one is slope monopoly. The Internet has originated in the United States, and it is obvious that at present most world-wide correspondence takes place in English. This is partly for the historical reason that the Internet has developed as a communication tool for the researchers of science and technology whose common language is English. Now general people in plus to science and techno logy researchers often utilize the Internet, but English is soundless the dominant language if one wants to look at foreign tissue sites or send E-mail across state borders. Therefore on that point is the possibility that, sooner or later in the 21st century, English will become the sole common language for international communication, thereby accompanying the inescapable decline of other languages. In this case the marches globalization means the hegemony of English-based, United States-centered single culture spreading all over the world. On the other hand, however, we may expect the second direction where various cultures in different countries thrive and interchange with each other, resulting in fruitful and plural global culture.