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This leads us to certain questions: what makes a language attractive and enables<br />
it to act as a common language, a language of negotiation, education In a word,<br />
what gives it prestige in relation to others It is certainly not merely a matter<br />
of demographics, as otherwise Hindi would be as well regarded as Spanish<br />
or English, and Bengali as much as Portuguese or French and far more than<br />
German. Neither is it official status in a large number of States, as otherwise<br />
Portuguese would be more valued than Chinese, Russian or German. And it is<br />
definitely not the supposed qualities of a language to better express a situation<br />
more easily or more directly – a weak argument that is nevertheless heavily<br />
relied on by activists in favour of a single language of communication.<br />
No, it is a series of characteristics in which demographic weight is important, as<br />
is official status, and whether the language is easy to learn. But it also includes<br />
other parameters such as history (we should not forget that the official<br />
languages of the United Nations are the languages of the winners of the Second<br />
World War), politics, economics, tourism, science and technology, standard of<br />
living, literacy, cultural industries, migration and so on and so forth, and today,<br />
without a shadow of a doubt, presence on the Internet.<br />
Of course, these parameters are not sufficient without political determination<br />
behind them. Churchill paved the way followed by the numerous and powerful<br />
political and economic interests of the English-speaking world when he said<br />
that the widespread use of English would be “a gain to us far more durable<br />
and fruitful than the annexation of great provinces”. As a result, the English<br />
languages is the main source of income for the United Kingdom, and Grin<br />
has reminded us that it thereby saves between 10 and 17 billion euros a year<br />
in translation costs owing the predominance of English in the drafting of<br />
European Union documents.<br />
Political will has also enabled societies such as those in Quebec and Catalonia<br />
to recover a professional, institutional and educational use for their languages,<br />
and has even enabled the restoration to life of dead languages like Hebrew.<br />
The Real World and the Virtual World<br />
Access policies for all languages are needed, but especially what is needed is for<br />
their speakers to feel ownership. In order to formulate a policy though, reliable<br />
indicators are required as well as substantial written or audiovisual material.<br />
From the outset we have lacked any kind of indicator on languages and we<br />
still lack such indicators on the presence of languages in cyberspace at present,<br />
but when we do have some, for written languages in particular, we see that the<br />
virtual world seems to reflect the dynamic of languages in the real world.<br />
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