Measuring linguistic diversity over the net

Many have wondered about languages represented on the net, on their proportions, on their readers. The exact extension of the web is itself still a huge enigma. There are many obvious implications in what can be called the "language divide".

UNESCO has published a volume collecting many different contributions on this subject. One of the contributions, that of professor Paolillo of Indiana University, reinforced the intuition that most pages are still written in English (more than 50%). Following Global Reach after English, Chinese, Japanese, and than Spanish, German, French and Italian. Chinese in particular has exploded from 2001 to 2005 becoming four times more present. Data obtained by search engine are not trustworthy. Romance languages (all) reach only 14% of the total pages.

Methodological problems have arised in trying to estimate language diversity. Namely: there is a large dependency over indexed pages (but what about the large amount of hidden non indexed pages?). How many language shoud we monitor? Daniel Prado (Unione latine) discusses political and judiciary questions, while addressing particular attention on Romance languages. An extremely interesting reading, from the methodological and political point of view.

ICh

Bibliography

Mesurer la diversité linguistique sur l’Internet Un ensemble d’articles signés par : John Paolillo, Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado et autres. – Révisé et accompagné d’une introduction de l’Institut de statistique de l’UNESCO Montréal (Canada). – Montréal : UNESCO, 2005 (CI.2005/WS/06) (pdf)