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3. Conclusion
This limited but to some extent representative cross-section of Romani usage
on the internet reflects the repertoire of Romani speech communities as well as
the functions of Romani in relation to those of the other languages used in web
presentations of Roma NGOs, international organisations and public as well
as private Romani online media. As the sociolinguistic situation of Romani is
by no means unique and asymmetrical relationships between languages are
common and natural, the case of Romani allows for generalisations of language
use against the background of linguistic diversity on the internet.
The use of a language on the internet is more or less based on its functional
scope. International English as the global lingua franca, naturally, is
the dominant language of the internet. Transnational languages such as
Portuguese, Russian, and Swahili cover their areas of usage in the same way
as national, regional, or minority languages do. On the basis of a functional
approach each domain is characterised by dominant and dominated languages,
a situation that reflects communicative reality or rather functionalities, as well
as the status and prestige of languages. However, status and function are not a
dialectic pair. Status prevails over functionality and not the other way around.
Therefore, web pages translated into dominated languages which lack the
necessary functionalities only contribute to symbolic additive multilingualism
which can be easily transformed into statistics. However, such data are not
meaningful at all. Only dynamic, transient and consequently unmeasurable or
rather uncountable language use which is based on communicative integrative
plurilingualism reflects the reality of linguistic diversity on the internet.
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