Review
“This book constitutes a landmark contribution to investigations into varied facets of language, culture, and onine communication. Just as [Naomi] Baron comments, it will prove to be a classic work among the internet literature. The volume will provide an invaluable resource for students as well as researchers in an array of fields.” –Linguist List
Two thirds of global internet users are non-English speakers. Despite this, most scholarly literature on the inter…
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The Multilingual Internet
This book edited by Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring is the joint effort of more than ten different authors. This book gathers some of the problems that people from different cultures and languages encounter in the internet. It’s is divided into five parts: The first part is about the writing systems and the internet; the second is about linguistic discourse features of the computer mediated communication; the third part is about gender and culture; the fourth is about language choice and code switching; and the fifth part is about language diversity.
Part I. Writing Systems and the Internet
The first part deals with the problem of languages that are not based on the Roman alphabet. The examples presented are from the Arabic golf, Taiwan, Greece, and French, although, the problem with French is a different one. The problem with French is the neography, the unconventional spelling of the language in CMC (computer mediated communication). In the other cases they use a Romanized version of their own language. In Greece, this phenomenon is called Greeklish in which the Greek phonemics is represented in the Roman alphabet. This problem is due to the fact that the software does not support Arabic, Chinese, or Greek alphabets, however, many of these languages have supporting software but they are difficult to use. In the case of Taiwan it takes four steps to write a single kanji (Chinese character).
Greeklish is viewed in three different perspectives. The first one is that is viewed as a threat to the Greek language stated by the Academy of Athens and it’s not well founded. The second one views Greeklish as a molding to the new internet era, as something positive; and the third one worries that by the facts that the internet does not accept minority languages, these would eventually disappear. Each of these perspectives have their own followers that debate intensively over this issue.
Part II. Linguistic and Discourse: Features of Computer Mediated Communication
This part focuses on how people communicate via CMC. These features include the use of informal writing such as all small caps, emoticons, the use punctuation, shortening, etc. These were studied in Japan, Hong Kong, and Cataluña. In Japan, the use of kaomoji (the Japanese equivalent of emoticons) it’s very popular for expressing human emotions that cannot be type in. Ex. ( ^_^ ). The same thing happens in Hong Kong, but they are not kaomoji’s, they are emoticons in the sense that they are not as elaborated as in Japan, for example ^_^. Also in Hong Kong appears the use of numbers as shortening for words as “99″ for “night, night.” The other feature such as shortening, punctuation appears on both these cultures.
Cataluña’s case is different. It is rarely spoken on CMC. Native speakers prefer to use Spanish because Franco prohibited the use in public. Catalan speakers got used to the fact that they couldn’t speak it in public spaces, so if they are going to begin a conversation with a stranger they would use Spanish. In the chapter the use of a machine translator is viewed as an option to promote Catalan in CMC.
Part III. Gender and Culture
This part studies the gender difference in CMC environment. First, they study a female majority chat forum in Thailand and Japan. In both cultures, females are taught to be submissive and pleasant to the husband, however, in these chats, females were the dominant group. They established the behavior pattern in which the male had to adapt. Although, the behavior was that of the culture, is to say, the language pattern was that of a submissive woman. Despite the fact that they dominated the chat, they were all mothers and wives in their culture, so nothing had changed.
A case studied in Portuguese, showed that both male and females broke the conversational norms. Both genders use `politeness sarcasm’ in which they address each other politely but without the proper rank. The difference was that males often used a more aggressive tone in the messages and self importance. While women were not so aggressive and used a self humbling language, is to say, women often apologize more than men.
Part IV. Language Choice and Code Switching
In this part, several studies were made to see which language was preferred in the internet. Overall, the preferred language is English. People from Egypt and Switzerland preferred English over their own native language on CMC. In Egypt’s case, the reason is that the software did not recognize classical Arabic, so many had to communicate in English. Even though there is software that recognizes Arabic, Egyptians still opt to use English for pragmatic reasons, it is easier to use.
In Switzerland, they prefer English because it’s not a national language, having three national languages French, German, and Italian. Speakers often feel uncomfortable speaking another national language, so they prefer English because is not anyone’s native language, so they are linguistically equal. The Swiss have the same preference on CMC, especially the Italian speakers, because they are minority.
Other cases were studied in which other minority languages were promoted. In a German base diasporic web forum that addresses members of other ethnic groups in Germany. Languages like Persian, Greek, Turkish, and others are seen in this web forum. Consequentially, the German language imposed itself on these forums because the important affairs such as science, politics, and economics were talked in German by these minorities. They used their native language for small talks and for joking around. When the conversation turned serious the language used was German.
Another study showed that people tend to be more receptive to the dominant languages such as, German, French, and especially English. When a person asks if the conversation could be in another language, sometimes they ended up being rejected in the chat rooms, depending witch language was suggested. Language is often identify with nationality and ideology. However, it wasn’t always like this, sometimes they got a positive reaction and could indeed switch to another language. Interestingly, non-native English speakers were more receptive to switch to English than to any other language.
Part V. Broader Perspectives: Language Diversity
The first study it’s about the language used and preference in the European Union site “Europa.” This site has a twenty language interactive portal in which users can comment in their native language. However, English is the most used in this site; the only time that other languages were used was when someone commented on French the conversation continued in French.
English is the dominant language of the internet because the most users are from North America and north Europe. Another factor is that the predominant writing system is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These factors are leaving minority languages out of the internet range, for example, the African linguistic diversity. It’s making English a necessity, while leaving other languages forgotten. Linguist fear that this will contribute to the disappearance of minority languages.