As its user population has exploded, however, the Internet’s linguistic repertoire inevitably has expanded, too, and transformed it into a multilingual space.

But how multilingual is the Internet? What languages other than English does it speak? Why these languages?

The development of the Wikipedia logo is a metaphor for the journey from English-monolingual to multilingual Internet (Source: Wikipedia)

These are some of the key questions explored in Internationalizing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms. Published in 2009, this collection of articles celebrates the non-Western, non-English speaking face of the Internet that is often hidden from academia and the media limelight.

Editors Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland challenge the tendency of communications and media scholarship to overemphasize the Anglophone-orientedness of online phenomena, taking for granted the multicultural and multilingual realities that persist alongside Western hegemony in virtual spaces. Using this skewed representation of the Internet as take-off point, the articles problematize whether the Internet truly bridges boundaries or, otherwise, creates other forms of division.

One obvious form of division online is the linguistic divide, which pertains to the differential valuing and representation of languages on the Internet. This issue is elaborated in the second part of the book—Language Communities Online. Through case studies of language practices in non-Western online communities, this section foregrounds languages other than English in the Internet and how the online space and these languages mutually shape each other.

In Chapter 5, Nanette Gottlieb presents the case of Japan:

While language use on the web in Japan, in terms of the selection of languages, is conservative overall with a strong monolingual bent, as dictated by national language policy, infrastructure, and cultural considerations, ludic use of the Japanese language itself online is multifaceted and far from conservative. (p. 65)

The scripts on the Wikipedia logo (Source: Wikipedia)

Gottlieb then describes Japanese language play in online messaging, which is exemplified in the use of emoticons as substitutes for verbal emotive expressions. Despite their banality as built-in features in hand-held gadgets and mobile messaging apps, emoticons can be valued as indexes of cultural distinction.

Subsequent chapters discuss the more serious function of the Internet as instrument for linguistic resistance and cultural preservation. Chapter 7 focuses on Welsh-speaking Internet users promoting Cymraeg as language of choice in their websites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites to assert its status as a contemporary language. The author, Daniel Cunliffe, argues that the success of this language movement can be attributed to institutional policy (the Welsh Language Act) and technical backing (software localization). Despite not having the same quality of support, the case of Catalan, articulated in Chapter 8, shows that the Internet can be a potent tool for the propagation of a minoritized language. The authors, Josep Lluis Mico and Pere Masip, partly echo the insights of Professor Josu Amezaga in his lecture about minority and minoritized languages and evinces the power of new media to facilitate the resurgence of languages silenced in traditional media platforms.

The final chapters in this sociolinguistic section focus on the intersection between language use and identity formation. The link between language and identity particularly in the context of migrant experience echoes the theme of the New Finnish Grammar, which was also reviewed for the Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge. Chapters 9 and 10 talk about how specific groups of migrants use language online to define aspects of their identity, which may be displaced and denied in the “real world” offline.

Urmila Goel examines the Indernet (www.theinder.net), a website that uses German language but which is primarily an Indian space. Through this forum, second generation Indians in Germany, who are othered as neither of India nor of Germany, find a virtual home where their transnational identity is accepted. Meanwhile, Ljilijana Gavrilovic talks about Serbian refugees, for whom “language is the primary element of identification” (p.147) and who use their home language online to assert their pre-refugee identities.

Overall, I found the recognition of the Internet as a beyond-Western phenomenon refreshing. The descriptive articles, whilst not equally engaging, provided information that made me more conscious of what and how languages are used online, by whom, and for what end. Of course, I was silently disappointed that Philippine languages were not mentioned in this conversation, but so were a host of other languages that are certainly represented in some corner or thread of this wide virtual web today. As an introductory reading on multilingual practices in cyberspace, however, the book succeeded in defamiliarizing the English-dominant Internet and inspiring a fresh curiosity for its linguistic repertoire.

Speak English, people! says British politician Ed Miliband (Source: msn.com)

Every ten years the UK government conducts a census, which every British resident is obliged by law to take part in. The last one happened in 2011, and the results are now in the process of being released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The 2011 census contained a section on language. Respondents were asked to name their main language, and those who named a language other than English or Welsh were also asked to indicate how well they spoke English—very well, well, not well, or not at all. This question about English proficiency had not been asked before, and its inclusion was a sign of the political times. In the last few years, politicians have become obsessed with promoting the English language as a symbol of ‘Britishness’. All the mainstream political parties now deploy a kind of rhetoric in which speaking English is a patriotic duty, while not speaking it is a threat to national unity and ‘social cohesion’.

In many countries this sort of rhetoric has a long history, but in Britain, for various reasons, it does not. For one thing, the modern UK is a union of four historic nations: there is no single British national identity, and no single language that all Britons have always spoken. English only became the majority language of some parts of the UK in the 20^th century, and it has never been given ‘official’ status in law. Nor, until recently, has its status featured prominently on the mainstream political agenda. The only politicians who consistently raised the subject were representatives of the Celtic nationalist parties, whose concern was not the status of English but the rights of Britain’s Welsh and Gaelic-speaking minorities. Elsewhere in British politics, the feeling was quite strong that what languages people spoke was not the business of the state.

But around the turn of the millennium this began to change. Two main developments prompted the shift: on one hand, increasing popular concern about rising numbers of immigrants, and on the other, increasing anxiety about the threat of radical Islam. This was seen not only as an external threat, but also as an internal one, especially after the ‘7/7’ bombings that killed more than 50 people in London in July 2005. Unlike the 9/11 attackers in the US, the 7/7 bombers were native rather than foreign: most were of Pakistani ancestry, but they were born and bred in Britain. Attention began to focus on the problem of the ‘home grown terrorist’, prototypically imagined as a young male Muslim who had been radicalized because he wasn’t properly integrated into British society.

In 2006, in response to these concerns, the Labour administration created a new department for ‘communities and local government’, whose remit included responsibility for promoting better integration or ‘social cohesion’. It soon became clear that what this actually meant was attacking the ideology of multiculturalism, and removing whatever structures had supported it in practice. And multilingualism, the linguistic correlate of multiculturalism, was one of the easiest and most obvious targets.

In 2008, after a security report announced that multiculturalism was making Britain ‘a soft touch for terrorists’, the minister in charge of the department for communities made a speech castigating local councils for translating material into community languages. This, she suggested, was ghettoizing minorities, giving them no incentive to bother learning English, and so preventing them from integrating with the majority. We all knew where that would lead: ultimately, it was implied, it would lead to more suicide bombings on London underground trains. (Though inconveniently for this theory, the 7/7 bombers did speak English like the natives they were; they even left martyrdom videos in Yorkshire-accented English.)

Since 2008, a steady stream of this kind of rhetoric from politicians and in the media has created a new ‘folk devil’: the immigrant, or member of an established minority ethnic group, who doesn’t speak English and can’t be bothered to learn it. This figure is blamed for all kinds of things: for sending non-English-speaking children to school where they will hold the natives’ children back; for demanding translation and interpreting services that cost the taxpayer millions; for putting up signs in shops that make the natives feel excluded; for fragmenting our communities and threatening our security. Our main political parties have vied with each other to whip up anxiety and resentment which they can then address by taking punitive action against linguistic shirkers and freeloaders.

Labour’s main contribution when they were in power was to ‘reform’ the immigration laws to reflect the new importance accorded to speaking English. First they brought in a citizenship test that has to be taken in ‘a recognized British language’ (aka English—in theory you could do it in Welsh or Gaelic, but Home Office statistics suggest that no one ever does), and then they tightened the English language requirements for those needing work or family visas. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government which came to power in 2010 continued the demonizing process. In 2011, the Tory communities minister Eric Pickles declared it unacceptable for anyone to leave a British school unable to ‘speak English like a native’: young people who fell short of that ideal were making themselves, he said, ‘an unemployable subclass’. Which was rich, considering that unemployment among 16-22 year-olds was running at about 20%–large numbers of young people couldn’t get jobs whatever languages they did or didn’t speak, because there were no jobs.

The Labour Party, now in opposition, has evidently decided that their best strategy is to be even tougher on this issue than the Tories. In December 2012 the party leader Ed Miliband made a speech outlining Labour’s future policy on ‘social integration’. ‘We should start’, he said, ‘with language’. He went on to announce that a future Labour government will cut back further on resources for translation and interpreting, make immigrant parents sign ‘home-school agreements’ underlining their responsibility for ensuring their children speak English, and bring in English proficiency tests for any public sector worker whose job involves talking to members of the public.

Banging on about the importance of English, and the menace of the immigrant who can’t/won’t speak it, is now such a political commonplace, a week scarcely passes without some politician or other making a speech or a comment on the subject. And so far, no one (apart from academics like myself, whose opinions may safely be dismissed as ivory tower nonsense) has challenged the basic presuppositions of this discourse. But the census, whose findings on language were released a couple of weeks ago, has provided what I’m hoping will be some usable ammunition.

If you read about these findings in the media you will probably wonder what I’m talking about, since the reporting was mostly framed by the very presuppositions I’ve just been criticizing. The press and the national TV channels all went with the same story: ‘Polish now Britain’s second language’. In the right wing press, another popular story was ‘22% of households in London contain no one who has English as their main language’. But if you go to the ONS website and take a look at their facts and figures, you may well conclude that the most significant finding is not how many British residents speak Polish, it’s how few of them don’t speak any English.

According to the census data, English in 2011 was the declared main language of 92% of British residents over the age of 3 (around 50 million people). Of the 8% who named another main language, 80% (3.3 million) reported speaking English well or very well. 726,000 said they did speak English but not well, and 138,000 said they spoke no English. The ONS has done the maths: those with limited or no proficiency in English are 1.6% of the British population; those with no proficiency are less than 0.5% of the population. (And that figure must include pre-school children and people who had only just arrived in Britain at the time of the census.)

So, the UK government’s attempt to ascertain the scale of the problem they’ve been talking about incessantly for the past five years has revealed that they’ve been making a mountain out of a molehill—or to put it another way, manufacturing a moral panic. It’s ugly, it’s shameful, and it’s time for it to stop.