Most Signposts Are in English Along the Info Superhighway

The globalization of the Internet, common wisdom says, will make our world smaller.

And the growth of the Net worldwide, experts add, will only speed the spread of English as the common language of the globe.

In the aftermath of World War II, English surpassed French as the official language of Western diplomacy. And in the ensuing decades, it also became the unofficial language of world commerce. Now, as the Japanese cybersurf, China adds its own Internet backbone and commercial online services invade Europe, English may very well become the indisputable medium of world culture. Some in France and elsewhere, however, are resisting this tsunami of English cybersurf.

"The Internet will be another great force for the Anglification of the planet," says St. Jude Milhon, a Bay Area computer culture author and longtime hacker.

The reasons seem simple enough: The Internet is anchored in the United States, and the overwhelming majority of World Wide Web sites (4.3 million hosts), newsgroups and chat rooms are based here. Most software, especially that which is used to navigate the Net, is written in English. "Search engines," such as Yahoo, that help cybersurfers search Web sites by subject are largely in English. Even computer keyboards are often based on the English alphabet. And for e-mail to be a two-way street, people need to speak the same language.

Although the number of non-English Internet sites more than doubled last year, 90% of Internet traffic worldwide is in English. In Japan, most corporate and university Web sites are in English. And in France, the growth of the English-dominated Net has so alarmed leaders that they have formed a group, la Francophonie, to preserve the use of French in cyberspace.

French President Jacques Chirac said recently that English domination of the Internet poses a "major risk for humanity: linguistic uniformity and thus, cultural uniformity."

And therein lies the rub: Instead of seeing a small world of multiculturalism, many foreigners view the emergence of the Net as another tool for American cultural imperialism. A small world to us becomes a drone of "It's a Small World [After All]" to the rest of the world: Disneyfication, rock and American schlock culture have yet another avenue to flood the world.

"I sometimes regret that English is used in French newsgroups," says French Internet surfer Jean-Pierre Binisti.