My First Ever Blog Post

To start off my first blog post it seems a good idea to talk about something we explored in lecture only yesterday…

Multilingualism online

We were told that back in 1998, more than 80% of the internet’s content was written in English. I thought this was astonishing, although not as astonishing as the fact that by 2012 this figure had already dropped to 55%!

It seemed the rest of the world was catching up quickly, although the presence of English on the internet has remained high, and at this rate probs always will. Followed by Chinese, it is the most used language online by far.

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At first, I thought perhaps this was due to Brits, Aussies and Americans spending all their time on Facebook, filling the internet with useless status updates. Although other justifications for the high percentage of English became clear to me.

One of them being that English is a Lingua Franca. In other words, it is a common language that speakers from all over the world can use to communicate. A lot of info online is in English which allows people from all over the world, who speak this Lingua Franca, to access it.

It didn’t even cross my mind that speakers of a minority language, in which the search results may provide minimal information, may actuallygoogle-search in English for a higher quality of answers.

Because of its high internet presence and overall world dominance, some people may think English is a killer language. Call me biased, but the number of languages spoken in the world was declining before the internet was introduced and English was plastered all over it.

In some ways, the internet encourages multilingualism and has potential to support languages that are becoming extinct, bringing speakers of these languages together and educating others. From my own experience, I have used the internet to help my own language learning of German and Italian.

It seems amazing to me that there is one space where people from hundreds of countries can access, communicate on and learn from. Almost the whole world at our fingertips. It’s almost impossible to imagine a life without the internet now.