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Jenny Rein
Professor Carlos Nash
ANTH 502
2 July 2014
Multilingualism and the Internet
I’ve always had an interest in learning other languages, and learning about the ways other
people live and communicate. For example, I’ve taken Spanish classes since I was in pre-school,
I’ve studied abroad throughout Spain, and my family hosted a foreign exchange student from
Costa Rica my junior year of high school. Even though these are just a few of the many things
that I could do to be more culturally and linguistically aware, before this class the Internet being
provided and used in languages other than English is something that I rarely, if ever, thought
about. It never crossed my mind that the world is so multilingual and the Internet should reflect
that.
While I am also nearly fluent in Spanish, I grew up in an English-speaking American
household so our Internet was always in English. I never tried to go to a website that didn’t cater
to English language speakers. Even when I was learning Spanish I never remember going to
many Spanish-speaking websites, blogs, etc., I always used different mediums like movies and
books. After reading the chapters about language change and the multilingual Internet from
David Crystal’s, Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide, I got to thinking. Because of all of the
languages spoken throughout the world and the emergence of the Internet in places that it was
previously unavailable, the once English dominated Internet will soon be a thing of past.
Crystal argues that the increase in multilingualism has been “The most notable
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development within the medium since the 1990s and one which seems set to continue,” (Crystal,
p.57). With all of the evidence provided, I whole-heartedly agree. However this multilingualism
within the Internet has not always been the case.
As Crystal points out, “Changes in language typically take decades, or even lifetimes,
before they are established,” (57). Because of its brief history, it is to no surprise that the effect
of each individual language on the Internet, and the effect of the Internet on each language is
very minimal. Although so much has happened during the Internet’s brief history as more and
more people continue to use it. A Pew Research study shows that the percent of American adults
alone who use the Internet grew from 14 percent in 1995, to 87 percent in 2014, (Fox, 2014).
According to the Computer History Museum it wasn’t until 1977 that Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak announced the creation of the Apple II computer, an off-the-shelf machine that would
begin to create consumer and small business markets for computers, (2004). But even this was
years before the Internet was widely introduced and available.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the first web browser in 1990 and it was originally called the
WorldWideWeb. However the Internet was not a part of many peoples lives until the mid 1990s.
At the time of its origin, the Internet was exclusively English and people felt that in order to use
the Internet, they needed to learn English. This idea was made apparent when the 8-year-old son
of Kyrgyzstan’s President Akayev told his father that he had to learn English, “Because the
computer speaks English,” (78).
Today we are a world made up of ever-multilingual people and that means that the things
we use everyday need to be ever multilingual, the Internet being one of those things. Even
though English is not the most widely spoken language in the world it continues to be the firstspoken language for the most Internet users, however trends in the percentage of Internet growth
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show that this very well may not be the case in years to come. To have some statistics to
compare the Internet usage statistics with, in 2014 Chinese was the most widely spoken firstlanguage with nearly 2 billion speakers, followed by Spanish with 414 million speakers, and
English came in third place with 335 million speakers (Lewis, 2014).
Of the 1.8 billion Internet users in 2010, 496 million were English users (27.5 percent),
408 million were Chinese users (22.6 percent), and only 140 million were Spanish users (7.8
percent). I thought that Crystal pointed out an assumption that also can apply to the
underrepresentation of major languages like Chinese and Spanish, and the overrepresentation of
English on the Internet. He noted, if 20 percent of Wales speaks Welsh, then it would be implied
that 20 percent of Wales uses Welsh on the Internet but that is not the case (Crystal, p.87). It
would be appropriate to assume that because there are 2 billion Chinese speakers in the world,
that the number and percentage of Chinese Internet users would reflect that proportionally.
Although, the number of Chinese users is growing at a greater rate than English, Chinese
language growth on the Internet increased 1,162 percent between 2000 and 2009. What surprised
me the most is the nearly 356 million-user gap between English and Spanish Internet users, when
there are 79 million more people in the world who speak Spanish rather than English.
I’ve been hearing for a while that the Arabic language continues to increase. I remember
my dad, who works with clients in the UAE and has picked up conversational Arabic, that I
should think about taking language classes in college because it is such a useful language to have
in the business world today. While there were only 3.3 million Arabic users in 2010, the
percentage of Internet language growth topped the charts at 2,298 percent. I think this is a sign
that emerging and formerly underrepresented nations are now beginning to widely use the
Internet and this will increase Internet multilingualism.
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Another statistic from today that could point to greater multilingualism is the fact that the
“others” language category, a language other than English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese,
Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, Russian, or Korean, accounted for 314 million people (17.4
percent) and grew by 399 percent between 2000 and 2009. This is a sign that some of the nondominant or widely spoken languages now have Internet available to them, and are using it.
With each passing year the multilingualism within the Internet continues to grow and
advance, especially in those lower developed countries. In 2010 the top two areas in terms of
Internet growth in the world were Africa and the Middle East. These are two large areas that
house severely lower developed nations. The number of Internet users in Africa reached 86
million, a 1,810 percent increase from 2000 to 2009 (Crystal, p.80). The number of Internet users
in the Middle East reached 58 million, an astonishing 1,675 percent increase between 2000 and
2009 (p.80). Whereas in North America, where the Internet is most advanced and originated, the
number of users only grew 140 percent between 2000 and 2009 (p.80). These statistics show that
while the Internet is growing everywhere, it is growing at an exponentially high rate in nations
where it was not prevalent before. It is growing in nations with a number of unique languages
and cultures. This will greatly contribute to the multilingualism present within the Internet in
years to come.
For this paper I looked at a lot of statistics, but I wanted to gain a better understanding of
what actual people who live outside of the United States and have a first language other than
English view, and use the Internet. So I decided to interview my former foreign exchange
student, Sofia Nuñez, who is from Turrialba, Costa Rica, and my friend Jan Martens, who is
from Hoisdof, Germany.
Sofia Nuñez lived with my family in Kansas City for an entire year, and I remember she
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always said how fast the Internet here was. My high school also provided us with MacBook Pro
laptops, and at the time (2010) she had never used an Apple product. I found this very strange as
Apple is all over the United States. When I talked to her the other day about the Internet, she told
me that because she lives in a smaller town many people don’t use the Internet, and her family
still uses a dialup service. It sounds a little ridiculous, but I can’t remember the last time I used
dialup Internet. However I did find it interesting that an overwhelming majority of websites offer
some sort of Spanish version. For example, when she visited the US she loved the store Free
People. But Free People, who is a fairly small retail store, has a Costa Rican website where she
can find and look at clothes. I also talked to her mother who said things like this are very recent.
The Nuñez family didn’t get their first computer until 2008, a good 13 years after my family got
one.
Jan Martens lived with my next-door neighbors for a year during my senior year of high
school. When talking to him it seemed like the Internet is Germany was much more similar to the
Internet in America rather than Costa Rica. This is probably because as a nation Germany is very
highly developed. I looked more into this and found that Germany had a very high human
development ranking fifth, whereas Costa Rica has a high human development ranking sixtysecond (Human Development Index, 2011). Even when Jan was in America I felt like things like
the school provided MacBook Pros and every student having a smartphone didn’t faze him as
much. When I spoke to him the other day he said that he basically could do everything in
Germany that he could in America. Most websites he visited had a German page or were
translated. However he did mention that Internet censorship was a big deal in Germany. For
example, he can’t watch some YouTube videos and channels that he liked when he was in
America because they are banned.
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The future for the Internet and multilingualism looks bright. Just look at how far the
Internet has come, and how many millions of people it has reached in its short history. As the
Internet continues to reach more and more nations that are home to a wide variety of languages,
beliefs, cultures, and needs, multilingualism will continue to grow. I agree with Crystal, the
multilingualism present is one of the biggest advancements made by the Internet. The English
dominated Internet will soon become a thing of the past.
References
Crystal, D. (2011). A multilingual Internet. In Internet linguistics: A student guide. New York,
NY: Routledge.
Crystal, D. (2011). Language Change. In Internet linguistics: A student guide. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Fox, S., Rainie, L. (2014). The Web at 25 in the US. Pew Research Internet Project. Retrieved
online on 2014, July 5 from: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-inthe-u-s/
Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2014. Ethnologue: Languages of
the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version:
http://www.ethnologue.com.
Martens, J. (2014, July 1). Telephone interview.
Nuñez, S. (2014, July 2). Telephone interview.
United States Census Bureau. (2010). New census bureau report analyzes nations linguistic
diversity. Retrieved online on 2014, July 5 from:
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/american_community_survey_acs/cb
10-cn58.html
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