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Natalia GENDINA
Director, Research Institute for Information
Technologies in Social Sphere,
Kemerovo State University of Culture and Arts;
Member, Russian Committee,
UNESCO Information for All Programme
(Kemerovo, Russian Federation)
The Importance of Information Literacy
in the Development of Multilingualism in Cyberspace
Preservation of linguistic diversity is one of the global problems and challenges of
cultural ecology. At the end of the twentieth century humanity faced a complex
of socio-natural acute contradictions that affect the world in general as well
as particular regions and countries. Under generally accepted classification
developed in the early 1980s three main groups of global problems are distinguished:
• problems associated with basic human social communities (prevention of
global nuclear catastrophe, closing the gap in the levels of socio-economic
development between developed and developing countries, etc.);
• issues concerning the relationship between man and environment
(environmental, energy, raw materials and food, space exploration, etc.);
• problems requiring special attention to the relationship between man
and society (profiting from scientific and technological progress,
elimination of dangerous diseases, health care improvement,
eradication of illiteracy, etc.).
There are other classifications of global problems, but any of them is arbitrary,
since all problems are closely related, have no clear boundaries and overlap
each other.
One of the global problems is the rapid loss of linguistic diversity of mankind.
Hundreds of languages are endangered: languages with a small number of
speakers that have no writing and other signs of high social status, the so-called
“small” or “minority” languages. This process can be compared to a decrease
in the Earth’s natural diversity. Environmentalists around the world precisely
estimate the loss of biodiversity as a catastrophe. However, socio-cultural
consequences of language extinction and decreasing linguistic diversity is
hardly less dangerous than those of the decline of biodiversity.
The writings of the eminent German linguist W. von Humboldt and his 20th
century followers German linguist L. Weisgerber and U.S. ethnolinguists E. Sapir
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