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Daniel PIMIENTA
Director, Networks and Development Foundation FUNREDES
(Saint Domingue, Dominican Republic)
DILINET: Building Indicators for Linguistic Diversity
in the Internet
The theme of linguistic diversity, in the broader frame of cultural diversity,
is transversal to many society matters (from education to business) and is
emerging at the center of many actual debates. Do languages – as assets of
humanity - require public policies to be preserved, promoted or supported Is
English the accepted lingua franca for international research collaboration and
business To what extent has the business globalization opened inescapable
requirements for marketing in other languages
These questions, that are essential for the development of information
societies, gain even more relevance when they are referred to the Internet, a
space which has seen the initial dominance of English getting more balanced,
both in terms of users and contents, in the last years, as a consequence of the
intense spread of the Net in many regions. Is the “digital divide” a simple issue
of access or shall the content divide and subsequent linguistic divide also be
addressed Will translation of contents be a workable and acceptable panacea
for multilingualism
The theme of linguistic diversity on the Internet, which has been for a long
period dealt by a small group of specialists, is gaining now the attention it
deserves among policy makers and many stakeholders. As a side effect from
the recent development of internationalized domain names (IDNs) more
public awareness has been gained and the theme is becoming a central topic in
international agendas as seen in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and in
the main organizations in the field of the information society, such as UNESCO
and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Furthermore, the issue
is also rising in the agenda of business, and calls for a clear policy framework for
the virtual world.
As for indicators, a recent publication by UNESCO [1] reports on the current
situation and evaluates future perspectives: the situation it describes is indeed
paradoxical and quite alarming. Until the late 90s, this field was marked by a
lack of serious indicators; this period was followed by the preliminary work of
a handful of pioneers, which provided some indicators, most of them limited to
number of users and the split of the World Wide Web per language. However,
now that interest in the theme is becoming visible, the existing works aiming