Internet Linguistics by Crystal David

Author:Crystal, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Methodological Issues

Industry surveys of language diversity on the Internet have been carried out by a number of organizations, and are widely reported. All, however, have to be treated with extreme caution, as their procedures differ. Very different results would be obtained if an analyst counted users, web pages, websites, or host servers. The amount of language represented on a website also varies, ranging from total translation to a token presence. An important task of Internet linguistics is to evaluate the claims about language use that have been made and to develop more reliable quantitative measures. Peter Gerrand, for example, has made a series of important distinctions, recapitulated in the following paragraphs.12

It is possible to count the number of active Internet users in a country, and establish user profiles, but there is no easy way to determine the language they actually use from such statistics. Industry surveys make a number of questionable assumptions, such as that online use will have a direct relationship to offline use. If 20 per cent of the population of Wales speak Welsh, then (it is implied) 20 per cent will use Welsh on the Internet. This is far from being the case, for a variety of reasons. Welsh speakers do not all have Internet access at home. Not everyone able to speak Welsh is equally able (or willing) to read and write in it. People display differential language skills, especially when there is a choice to be made between a dominant and minority language. And even when these factors do not apply, the decision whether to use Welsh or English is very much dependent on sociolinguistic and stylistic factors. A user might find Welsh appropriate for everyday chat but not for business communication, or vice versa. Just because people speak a language at home does not mean they will automatically use that language when they type (or speak) on the Internet.

The assumption of offline/online equivalence becomes even more suspect when we consider communities where choices have to be made between several languages, such as French, German, Romansch, and English in Switzerland. The likelihood is that minority languages will have their Internet use overestimated, and majority languages will have it underestimated. In particular, international languages will be seriously underestimated, which is why we need to be cautious about accepting the general view that the use of English on the Internet is significantly declining.

At best, user profiles show the potential use of a language. They are helpful for policy makers who wish to promote a particular language on the Internet, but they do not provide a reliable guide to active language use.

Measures of user activity are far more useful, as these aim to plot the actual use of a language on the Internet, using outputs where contributions can be clearly identified, such as posts to a forum or a chatroom. In principle we can take a sample of Internet traffic and quantify the use of individual languages within it. However, for this to be done for large samples,

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