Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Around 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today, and the vast majority of them have only a tiny amount of representation on the internet. Wikipedia only has articles in 299 languages, and half of those languages have less than ten thousand articles. Google Translate supports 109 languages, but many of the language pairs are translated via English. Major social networks support even fewer: Facebook’s interface is available in about 100, Twitter’s in about 50, and new social networks tend to launch exclusively in one language. Even relatively substantial national languages, like Icelandic, are becoming displaced by English and a handful of other languages with big internet presences, and those that don’t have government funding behind them are doing even worse. Unfortunately, the versions of these statistics that I included in the first draft of this chapter in 2016 had barely changed when I updated them in early 2020. The momentum for making the internet hospitable to every language is slowing where it should be increasing. Nonetheless, users are still figuring out ways to communicate online: people who are illiterate or who speak languages that don’t have well-established writing systems or autocomplete tools are among the highest users of voice texting, or sending five- to thirty-second audio clips through chat apps.