The Internet Shifts East

Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article discussing the World Intellectual Property Organization's prediction that in less than 10 years, Chinese will be the most widely-used language on the web. Assuming the Internet becomes a truly global entity, this is an obvious (and mathematically correct) conclusion. On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'? And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"

What about programming languages?

[ssheth]

While the content produced will increasingly come in many different languages as we move forward over the next few years, I still see little movement on the actual programming front.
Today, 99% of all programming is still done in English which ends up giving a definite bias towards English as the language of the web.

If someone comes out with some programming language that can be programmed in local languages and which gets popular, that is when I see a real shift happening in the base of the web. Otherwise, the content producer still ends up embedding their original language content inside English HTML .. which ends up meaning that he/she also must understand English, thereby limiting the scope of the Web to those who at least have a passing knowledge of English.

More cock-yanking from California...

[Bowie J. Poag]

The idea that Chinese will be the predominant language on the web is absurd.

China, despite recent moves towards a more open, capitalist society, has a problem that wont go away. Saw an interesting program on PBS a few months ago that discussed how China has changed in the past 50 years. Basically, you have a situation these days where the gap between the upper class and lower class is insanely wide. The wealthier segment of the population can often afford computers, internet access and the like, but this wealthier portion only makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of China's population. Meanwhile, the bulk of China's population are subsistance farmers who aren't allowed to even BE in (let alone conduct business in) China's main citiies. In most of these rural areas, electric power and indoor plumbing are considered high tech luxuries. Infact, China's national telecom infrastructure is considerably less extensive than most states in the U.S.

China's on the move, yes, but they have a looooooooooooong long way to go before their influence on the Internet becomes anywhere near as large as Europe's or America's influence.

Cheers,

Re:Slight mistake in the article

[Happy go Lucky]

Since when CNN is a news site ? I see similarities between Chinese people who read the People's Daily and westerners who watch CNN.

There's a critical difference.

In the US/Europe/Australia/the civilized world in general, people actually have the choice to read the People's Daily or whatever. When I was in college during the Reagan Years, the only problem I had with getting copies of Pravda or Izvestia was that the local newsstand didn't want to waste shelf space on publications in Russian. And I learned Spanish by listening to Radio Havana.

The cops didn't kick down my door for reading Communist bullshit or listening to it on the radio. RH wasn't jammed by the government. And if the Chinese People's Daily is online, there's nothing stopping you from finding it other than their webmaster's incompetence.

Think someone in China could lay hands on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page or the Economist [economist.co.uk] so easily and with so few repercussions?

Take Ed Abbey's masterpiece, _The Brave Cowboy_. In it, no end of trouble is caused by the fact that the protagonists/heroes refused to pay taxes, carry ID, or be drafted. Ten buck in any decent bricks-and-mortar bookstore in the US. And I'll just bet that China has no trouble whatsoever with such subversive books floating around.

Or we can look at the books which portray the US as a corrupt, decaying empire. Heinlein's _TMIAHM_ or Pournelle's _High Justice_ or Falkenberg's Legion series. Or psuedo-subversive nonfiction like Noam Chomsky's garbage. All of it sold openly and completely unrestricted in the US. And I dare you to try to translate it into Mandarin and distribute it in China.

Most Americans are idiots, maybe. I don't agree with that statement, but it has been made and defended here on /. Two or three generations of television and a generation of computer/video games have made our culture a culture of people who sit around, accept the entertainment given them, and make no effort to learn beyond what's presented to them. And they end up with the attention span long enough to last from one commercial break to the next on the TV news. And as a result, CNN and most other major news outlets in the US tailor their material to the short attention span crowd. And some people claim that the news is doctored to some degree to meet the wishes of co-owners or advertisers. I mean, would WB News carry an expose about how Time Magazine can't get anything right? Would NBC (or MSNBC) go in-depth about what a bloated, spying POS Windows XP is? I'm not holding my breath.

But there's a distinction to be made. Here in the US, we CAN have better if we want it. It's a matter of just getting a decent newspaper, the BBC World Service on shortwave, or whatever. It takes more effort than turning on the latest insipid bullshit from WB/SeeBS/FOX/ABC/Whatever, but it's there.

There are plenty of countries where that's not an option. You WILL get your news from politically-acceptable sources. You WILL view only acceptable web sites. And if you don't, then you can be dragged off to die in a slave labor camp or shot with your spouse billed for the ammunition. And China is exactly that kind of fascist rathole.

Oops, that was a bit of a rant. Sorry about that.

Fairly meaningless

[MisterBlister]

Sure, Chinese may very well be the native language of most Internet users in 10 years, due to the giant size of the Chinese population, but any claims that this will cause some great shift in how the world uses the web is pretty silly.

Numbers alone aren't significant, if they were Chinese (which, as the article points out, has so many speakers) would be the quasi-official language of multinational business, travel, etc..Right? But it isn't...English is. My point isn't to praise English (which in many ways is a very stupid language, technically), but just point out that the numbers only tell a very small part of the story. I won't even bother to point out that many of these Chinese speakers who get on the net will be in no position to contribute much to the global economy in terms of buying goods for import, etc, due to political and economical roadblocks.

Re:Same old language barrier?

[sql*kitten]

Well duh... sorry, that sounds rather america-centric. Do you really expect everyone else to learn english so you don't have to learn anything else?

Actually, yes I do. English speakers, whether or not that was the mother tongue of all the individuals involved, after all, developed practically all the technology involved. English is the lingua franca of international commerce. Air traffic control and hotel concierges all over the world speak English. Engineers in many disciplines use English terminology, even if the rest of their communication is in their native language, and international academic journals are published in English. Esperanto was a nice idea (I even learnt basic conversation in it once) but English, with maybe French (which I speak, altho' not fluently) or Spanish for backup, is the de facto common tongue, and will enable you to travel or to business almost anywhere in the world. Remember that English is not a static language, it freely adopts words and phrases from other languages as required. It can be both precise and expressive, as required.

Maybe (relatively) few Chinese speak English, but relatively few Chinese even speak to non-Chinese at all. That country is not a cultural and linguistic "melting pot" like the US or UK, it is remarkably homogenous for such a large country. The question really is, will the Chinese become like us, or will they choose an isolationist policy? And don't forget, Chinese characters are available on computers at all because Western corporations decided that they should be - we are being as accomodating as we possibly can! If the Chinese want their own information infrastructure, they are free to create it for themselves - or they can choose to use ours, which we are making available freely. Why is America always the bad guy in cultural discussions?

Besides, there are purely technical reasons why English is a "better" language than Chinese for computing - look at the numbers of characters in the alphabets, for example. English words are distinct, Chinese ideograms are much more dependent on context and the interpretation of the listener.

Half-on the internet

[HalfFlat]

Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'?

Would you consider the average Western individual with dial-up access 'on the Internet'?

There really are two classes of Internet citizens: those who have a fixed IP and can be information sources; and those who have dynamic IPs or are forbidden to run servers, and are pretty much restricted to being information sinks. Sure it's an oversimplification, but the vast majority of people on the Internet through home-connections, are second-class Internet citizens.

In Australia for example, it is significantly more expensive to be fully on the net - we're looking at 15 to 23 cents per received megabyte of data, and they're marketting megabytes (10e6 bytes). If one is happy with a proxied web service and a server-free presence, then for $80 a month one can download 3 gigabytes or more over ADSL.

Re:Billion citizens != Billion Internet Users

[dunstan]

Erm, I don't expect the growth in internet usage in China to be based on individuals buying windoze PeeCees and using dial up access. Expect it to be based around some sort of appliances, probably in communal facilities in small towns. Remember the small town US mayor who in the early days of telephony confidently predicted "someday *every* town in America will have a telephone". Remember, too, that a couple of days ago we were discussing how the uptake of software libre in China is significantly higher than in the West.

Dunstan

Yeh, well

[autopr0n]

Look, you can learn what 'color' and 'font' mean without knowing the rest of it. And almost all localization schemes still allow you to type in the roman space.

So while yeh, some things will be intuitive for English speakers, particularly things like APIs. while "font" might be easy javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfo (of course, Java does in fact allow Unicode for variable and class names, so you could have like .. as a package name).

So, for a while I think most actual coding will be done in English, but that doesn't mean most website content will be. You could always have one web guy and one content guy as well. Or, for example you could use off the self software and fill it with localized content, (for example slashdot.jp [slashdot.jp]).

And lets not forget, Ruby, a programming language quickly gaining popularity was actually crated in Japan, where it's now more popular then Perl.

Re:"East" ?

[nahojd]

Assume that you are going to draw a map, and dont really know what the world looks like. It kind of makes sense to put the parts that you do know about in the middle, doesnt it? Im fairly sure thats what the Egyptians or Romans or whoever draw the first maps did. Hence, Europe/Africa in the middle. Besides, it also makes sense to cut the map in the largest body of water. That's also why the international date line is in the Pacific and not in the Baltic Sea.

India

[autopr0n]

Don't forget India. (and Pakistan). Both have large English speaking populations (as a second language for a lot of people, though) India, in fact, uses English in the government. I'm not sure about Pakistan though.

Of course, unlike the US, England, etc, India has lots of native languages as well.

Oh, one other thing. All Chinese students need to have minimum competency in English in order to get into collage. More people may speak Chinese well, but English is really starting to become a sort of lingua fracia. Of course, soon enough instant translation will take over and the idea of learning another language will be a quaint little hobby.

Re:More cock-yanking from California...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I notice that kind of stuff too. It is like people only criticize governments/nations that their own government and media have choosen to demonize. The West likes to demonize Iraq for killing Kurds, but Turkey does so with imputiny, they are the little darling of the West.

You always hear Americans mention China when they speak of repressive governments but rarely Saudi Arabi or Turkey(they have the second highest number of political prisoners after China which is an unfair comparison to China which has 19 times the population of Turkey, I am sure if they had a few million more people the Turkish government could be number one in this area).

This selective observance of reality and selective criticism is disturbing. Do not just criticize nations that your media demonize's and ignore ones who may be your homeland ally, but do the same thing.

Re:What about programming languages?

[CatherineCornelius]

Today, 99% of all programming is still done in English which ends up giving a definite bias towards English as the language of the web.

I don't know about you, but most of _my_ programming is in C or SQL, both of which owe far more to calculus and algebra than to any natural language. The idea that these are comparable to variants or dialects of English is absurd.

Re:Same old language barrier?

[(void*)]

That country is not a cultural and linguistic "melting pot" like the US or UK, it is remarkably homogenous for such a large country. The question really is, will the Chinese become like us, or will they choose an isolationist policy?

Saying China is not a melting pot betrays exactly the kind of blind ignorance of Chinese history. China has had 5000 years of history. The written language was standardized for longer than English was chosen as the lingua franca. These are very good reason for the Chinese to be proud. But many are not. In fact, many are eagerly learning English! Think about that, and stop adopting the heads in sands approach, my American friend.

And don't forget, Chinese characters are available on computers at all because Western corporations decided that they should be - we are being as accomodating as we possibly can!

This is ridiculous. When Taiwanese PC clone makers were manufacturing the models in the 1980s, I saw quite a few innovators come out to market their own Chinese enabled versions of the PC. These guys came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore. Unfortunately, standards were fragmented and there was no consensus on input methods. Then MS came in the late 1980s, and 1990s and swept these all away. This was followed by the internet. The point is that Chinese enabled PCs did start, and would have followed a natural course of evolution and competition, with or without American MNCs. It may be argued that their presence, and the internet accelerated the adoption of standards!

If the Chinese want their own information infrastructure, they are free to create it for themselves - or they can choose to use ours, which we are making available freely.

Yes, this will happen, as long as the Communist Government does nothing stupid like they did in the past like the Cultural Revolution.

Why is America always the bad guy in cultural discussions?

Becuase of holier than thou attitudes like that. Drop it, and accept the current Chinese diaspora. Live with the times. This is the only way forwards.

Re:What about programming languages?

[Mike Schiraldi]

Recognizable keywords in your native lanugage aren't necessary at all. Ever use assembly language?

XDR 0, 3
PME 9, AX
LLA AX, AH
WNV BX, AX
BCO 0, AX

Think about Unix: How long did it take you to learn that "cat" means "display some text"? About a second? Yeah, that's about as long as it would take someone who spoke only German.

Re:More cock-yanking from California...

[3seas]

It's not going to be about who has to learn what language in order to use the internet. But rather what language do you want to use to access the internet? Where the most used is determined by internet population of langauge use.

Give yourself a universal translator and it don't matter what language you speak or use. But what language is used most would inherently be relative to what the native language is of most of the users.

The article is suggesting, without saying it out right, that such a translator will exist in wide use by then.

It's really not so difficult to believe. But what is more difficult to accept for many psuedo programmers is that the same technology can and will be used to translate human languages into programming language (auto-coding) and therefor allow anyone who learns basic programming concepts to program using their natural human language.

mabe see other posts by yours truely?

Re:What about programming languages?

[CatherineCornelius]

if else [etc] are all a whole lot more obvious if you know what the words mean in everyday (English) usage

Sure, and it helps to understand what how the Greek sigma symbol is pronounced if you want to do math. This doesn't mean you need to learn Greek, or to understand a word of the language. The observation that programming is an activity performed in English is simply incorrect. One might as well claim that reverse polish calculators are programmed in German or Japanese, because the verb comes after the subject and the object in those languages.

Re:What about programming languages?

[geekster]

It's just commands wich happens to be taken from the english language.
I wouldn't really like to program like this:

hvis(a >= 10)
{
}
ellers
{
gør
{
a++;
}imens(a < 10);
}

Then again, choice is good. But I would just hate to work on an open source project with the source code in some, for me, strange foreign language. That would mean I'd not only have to learn C/C++ but perhaps C/C++/german, C/C++/russian, C/C++/chineese, etc.