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