Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

In 2008, we compared the first 30 languages to have a language recognition
system in Google, and we noted that they were, roughly speaking, the most
productive languages in terms of traditional literature. Recent public and
private initiatives to digitize library holdings might only serve to reaffirm the
status quo of linguistic diversity on the Web.
Should we then conclude that the Web can only be added to when publishing
comes first Probably not really, because of the 50-odd languages with a
language recognition system under Google, four fifths of them are the most
productive of literature and translations and the remaining dozen might have
far lower productivity but do have a larger quantity of articles on Wikipedia
and are well represented on Facebook.
As far as we know, there is no global study giving us an oversight of the place
of languages at the world level on social networks. We have however noted,
through an increase in the number of specialized studies and an accumulation
of various statistics, that written production through these means is far higher
than the production of web pages, even if it is often ephemeral 13 . The studies
carried out by Semiocast 14 in 2010 for Twitter, for example, showed that Malay
and Portuguese were used far more than Spanish, German, Russian and Italian,
for instance, with a greater presence on the traditional Web and far more robust
policies on the translation and digitization of works. The research has not been
repeated since, but the languages spoken in Indonesia might be far more present
today as it is the country with the third highest Generation 140 15 in the world.
Do social networks represent a second chance for languages Probably, because
cyberspace actually opens the door to forms of expression of no interest to
traditional publishing circuits. After all, science publishing in languages other
than English has found a place, albeit a modest one, thanks to the ease and low cost
of publishing on the Web, and traditional publishers do not want to run the risk
of publishing articles that would be of concern to a very small number of readers.
The Internet has undoubtedly enabled minorities absent from traditional
publishing to express themselves, but we should not think that this is enough.
There is still an inversely proportional relation between Internet access
and global linguistic diversity as we showed in 2008; the language divide
corresponds only too closely at the moment to the digital divide.
That is why it is important to stress aspects relating to infrastructure as much as
the ownership of technologies and content (text and multimedia) production.
13
The observatory site Portalingua , created by the Latin Union aims to
respond to this problem by compiling and placing in parallel studies and statistics on the presence of languages
in the various spheres of the knowledge society.
14
See: (page consulted on 9 July 2011).
15
A name for the Twitter-using generation, as the system only admits messages of 140 characters or less.
77