Not Enough Languages on the Web?

According to this Pajamas Media article, folks at the latest ICANN conference are concerned that there isn't enough linguistic variety on the web, what with English, Mandarin and Spanish speakers accounting for half of internet users. I think they're a bit off.

Visit Wikipedia: There's lots of content in lots of languages! Speaking of Wikipedia, if you take the figures in this article, there are around 1.2 billion Chinese speakers, 850 million English speakers and 400 million Spanish speakers. That's nearing 2.5 billion people. Take the larger estimate for English - 1.5 billion people - and you get 3.1 billion people. It looks like the dominant languages on the web are simply a reflection of the dominant international languages in the real world. (With Hindustani lacking broader reach because English is so prevalent as a second or third language in the places where it is spoken.) I'm frankly a lot more concerned about the things all those Chinese speakers can't say or read than about the language distribution at present.

The PJM article I link is a bit skeptical about the language planning biz, thinking these folks are barking up the wrong tree and pointing both to online translators and to online language learning options:

Why learn every language on earth when the massive computational power at our disposal can do it for us?

Okay, so even with the power of the web to provide your translations, you still want to become multilingual for your personal growth and amusement-don’t decry the Web-use it. Check out a fascinating new service called iTalki.com which allows the world’s poor to teach their local languages to others for a few small fee.More than any effort to dictate the wider adoption of languages on the Web, iTalki demonstrates the best of Net culture: the service may promote wider use and even preservation of local languages and dialects; it will help the world’s abject poor make a little money; it may promote better awareness and understanding of the world’s-and the Net’s - many cultures.

And once you've learned a bit of that obscure language, why not make a page of your own in it? Contribute to linguistic diversity on the web all on your own!

The article concludes with a pitch about Globish that is well-meaning, but that I think misses the point. If English standardizes on the web (and I think it will, to a degree), the model by which it happens isn't going to be Ogden's Basic, never mind something as artificial as Esperanto. It's going to be a spontaneous creation like LOLcat, only serious. And so we'll come full circle: Gutenberg's printing press fixed language. The web's going to turn it loose and let it run free to become what it becomes.