English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D It is a well-known saying that the Internet, an association of computer networks which enables exchange of information, has transformed the world into a „global village‟. According to Crystal (2006:3), “a village is a close-knit community, traditionally identified by a local dialect or language which distinguishes its members from those elsewhere”. For the „global village‟, the language of identity is English. This paper is an evaluation on the causes and consequences of the dominance of English in domain of internet communication. The discussion begins with the current situation of the prevailing online use of English. With over 300 million hosts connected by 2005, the Internet is now the globe‟s largest computer network, offering an increasing variety of services, including electronic mails, chatgroups, virtual worlds, World Wide Web, instant message, and blogging, categorized by Crystal (2006:19). In 2010, with reference to the Internet World Stats, although most (825.1 million) of the 1966.5 million Internet users were from Asia, English was the language used most among them (536.6 million), followed by Chinese (444.9 million) and Spanish (153.3 million). There is, as a result, a ubiquitous accessibility of Web documents in English. In 1998, about 85% of online texts were in English while the number of Internet hosts in English-speaking world increased at the highest rate of about 450%, against 420% to 250% in Japanese, French, and German-speaking countries (Nunberg, 2000). The English-speaking
English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D world accounted for over 80% of top-level Internet hosts and generated up to 80% of Internet traffic (Nunberg, 2000). Even in non-English speaking countries, with the percentage share of papers in English nearly doubled to 58% from 1970 to 2000 (Sano, 2002), English appeared to be the preferred language of the Net. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a popular way of indirect communication (Lewin & Donner, 2002), especially by email. Li (2000) stated the use of email by around 827 million people of January, 2000 and she suggested “the speed, efficiency, privacy and relaxation” as the factors that made email a preferred dialogue device. Email, fitting the new dynamic nature of the global markets‟ needs (Gimenez, 2006), is widely used from individual interaction to business communication with English being the major operating language (Crystal, 2003:114). In bilingual societies like Hong Kong, this is a true phenomenon. Referring to Evans (2010), English was the perceived most important language for email in the professional world in Hong Kong. As a university student in the city, I usually spend about 15 minutes on reading, writing or checking email a day as I mainly access to school information and sometimes communicate with my classmates through email, mostly in English. This is similar to the results of Gao‟s survey (2001), about the use of email of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The causes for the dominant status of English in internet communication are
English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D discussed as follows. The most significant one is the technical reason. The Internet and the World Wide Web are developed principally in the US, a native English-speaking country. Consequently, the standard protocols of the Net were designed for the English alphabets. Although the ASCII character set was extended to 8-bit code, so that non-English accents and diacritics could be included, it is still hard to handle the estimated 170,000 characters in all the world‟s languages (Crystal, 2006:236). I totally agree that, in Crystal‟s words (2006:26), “The set of characters on the keyboard determines productive linguistic capacity… Both sender and receiver are additionally constrained linguistically by the properties of the internet software and hardware linking them”. This explains the rapid spread of the Net in the English-speaking world. The Web “flattens the world” (McCrum, 2010) since it serves as a platform for information being exchanged quickly and widely among “geographically dispersed” (Nunberg, 2000) ordinary audiences at no marginal cost (Graddol, 2006) through the medium of English. The globalization of English also contributes to the dominance of the language on the Net. McCrum (2010) believed that “Global information networks, and a global market, require a global language” and English has become the global lingua franca in many aspects, including international trade, science and informal internet discussions (Nunberg, 2000), especially after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Sano,
English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D 2002). Nunberg (2000) mentioned the smaller was the number of local language speakers, the more competent was English, and hence the higher proportion of English found in the Web. For instance, English pages occupied as much as 30% in Holland & Scandinavia but only 10% or less in Latin America, while the numbers of readers of papers written in English exceeded that of papers written in Japanese by 10-20 times (Sano, 2002). Thus, to ensure their online publications could be “potentially „international‟ ” (Nunberg, 2000) and “widely read and properly evaluated” (Sano, 2002), Internet users intentionally write in English for international circulation and attention. In fact, the technical feature of the Web mentioned above facilitates online English publication. Meanwhile, the need for writing online in English for wider audience coverage encourages the technological development for this purpose, such as the searching technique by keywords in English. Thus, it could be concluded that these two contributing factors to the superior status of English in internet communication are interrelated. The resultant influences of the prevailing use of English on the Internet are remarkable and those affecting the language itself are the most interesting but controversial. A kind of cyber language is created with unique features. Examples include the use of abbreviations, ellipsis, omission of function words, and
English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D decapitalization of the initial letters in sentences or proper nouns for quicken pace of interaction; emoticons and special use of capital letters and punctuation to compensate for the lack of non-linguistic cues such as facial expressions, intonations or gestures in emotional expressions; online slang convention for entertainment and prestige identity; code-mixing for non-native English speakers to fill language gap and to add colour to the language, etc (Gao, 2001). A study (Lewin & Donner, 2002) proved that a distinctive CMC feature appeared every 32 words on average. Some regarded this negatively as a deviation and challenge for the “Standard English� (Li, 2000). Personally, I appreciate the dynamic, vivid and creative nature of the language and accept it provided that the communicative needs are achieved. The Web spreads messages more economically and effectively to the public than the traditional media. At the same time, yet, it limits access to knowledge to people with access to both the Internet and the English language. A great proportion of the electronically stored information, the settings of computer and application of the Net are operated in English. Most of the English technical terms used on the Web had still not been translated into other languages (Crystal 2006). Those who wish to use the computer and the Web must first learn English (Graddol, 2006). Otherwise, non-English users would probably be excluded from the electronic world of knowledge. Nunberg (2000) also pointed out that the insufficient infrastructure and
English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D economic difficulties hindered the development of internet communication between historically marginal regions like India and Latin America. It is unfair that access to knowledge is only available to those better-off people with higher education. Improvement needs much time and capital for large scale infrastructural construction and comprehensive education together with additional cost from non-English native speakers. Luckily, it is surveyed that people with Internet access in non-English speaking countries increased from 7 million to 136 million between 1995 and 2000 (Crystal, 2006:230). Another drawback of the English dominance in the Web is its contribution to the decreasing linguistic diversity. 90% of today‟s existing 6000 languages might be extinct in the coming century (Graddol, 2004). Sano (2002) revealed that the “migration, education, assimilation and diffusion of the electronic media” brought extinction to “precious cultural inheritances which provide important materials not only for language research but also for the elucidation of human intelligence”. The need to understand other languages significantly decreased in recent decades due to the vast availability of information in English online. Therefore, the prevalence of English on the Internet was blamed as “the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism” and “a major risk for humanity” (Nunberg, 2000). Fortunately, as Crystal (2006:230) mentioned, “with the Internet‟s globalization,
English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D the presence of other languages has steadily risen”. Multilingualism is the present policy of many corporate websites, making choice of language a „user preference‟ (Graddol, 2006). For instance, Yahoo! has established localized versions in French, Spanish, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. With technological improvement, software is more capable of displaying many different kinds of script. Surveys in the USA revealed that bilingual internet users preferred to use their first language on the Internet whenever it was available (Graddol, 2006). In fact, a resultant decreasing trend of the English use on the Internet is revealed in recent decades. Geoff Nunbery and Schulze found that about 85% of web pages were in English in 1998, which dropped to 72% in 1999 in a study by ExciteHome; and the Catalan ISP VilaWeb estimated a further drop to 68% in 2000 (Graddol, 2006). Nowadays, therefore, discussions concerning the future development of English flourish. People are interested in whether English will finally lose its role as the global lingua franca and be replaced by other languages, especially Mandarin which is the official language of China, one of the world‟s economic superpowers (Graddol, 2006:32), and has the greatest number of native speakers globally (Graddol, 2004). In short, English is the dominant language of internet communication with great linguistic and social impacts at present. Yet, I would like to conclude by
English as a Global Lingua Franca – Final assignment Lee Sin Ming 09369162D drawing attention on the changing situation with Tyler Chamber‟s saying, “the future of the Internet is even more multilingualism and cross-cultural exploration and understanding than we‟ve already seen” (Crystal, 2006:235). References Crystal, D. (2006). Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gao, L.W. (2001). Digital age, digital English. English Today, 17(3), 17-23. Gimenez, J. (2006). Embedded business emails: Meeting new demands in international business communication. English for Specific Purposes, 25, 154-172. Graddol, D. (2004). The future of language. Science, 303, 1329-1331. Graddol, D. (2006). English Next. London: British Council. (Pages 32-33 & 41-48). Lewin, B. and Donner, Y. (2002). Communication in Internet message boards. English Today, 18(3), 29-37. Li, L. (2000). Email: A challenge to Standard English? English Today, 16(4), 16-29. McCrum. (2010). The World At Your Fingertips: From Google to Globish, 1989-2009. In Globish: How English Become the World’s Language. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. (Chapter 13) Nunberg, G. (2000). Will the Internet always speak English? The American Prospect, 11(10). Sano, H. (2002). The world‟s lingua franca of science. English Today, 18(4), 45-49. Evans, S. (2010). Business as usual: The use of English in the professional world in Hong Kong. English for Specific Purposes, 29(3), 153-167.