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Different spoken languages and the Internet

Kieren McCarthy

New standards mean that all the world's languages can now finally be used.

AT A United Nations meeting last month, a bespectacled Swede made a small, barely noticed announcement that nevertheless represented a pivotal moment in the history of the Internet.

"Regarding the technical implementation for the world wide web, we are done," Patrik Faltstrom told the Internet Governance Forum. By "we are done," he meant that following a decade of hard work by a global consortium of engineers and linguists, they had finally decided on a document that would enable all the world's languages to be fully represented on the Internet. People will be able to type in addresses in their own language, search in their own language, and move around the Internet in their own language.

The challenge was every bit as immense as it sounds. The Internet was designed to work with the English alphabet — a to z, and the numbers 1 through 9. Useful symbols rapidly made their way into the system — plus, minus, dash, and so on — each represented with a particular code (or, as Internet engineers insist on calling it, an "identifier"). Agreeing on identifiers was easy at first, but as Internet use spread across the globe, people started asking for more to be added to fit other languages, whether an accent on a letter, or an entirely different alphabet.

Global balancing act

As languages have spread and developed, some elements have changed and some stayed the same. Some have grown to have different meanings. Some look identical and are anything but. One thing is for certain: everyone is unshakeable in their belief that their language is as valid as any other. No matter how wonderful the Internet is, it does not override culture and history. The result has been a very careful balance. "No script and no person will be happy with the definition of identifiers," explained Mr. Faltstrom. "Everyone will be unhappy. We just have to find a standard that makes people the least unhappy as possible."

It can be difficult for an English speaker to grasp the problem. For example, the small dots over the "a" and "o" in Mr. Faltstrom's surname carry significance and meaning. Because it is a Western language, we are able to view it as an "a" and an "o" with some dots. Not so with different alphabets. Fortunately, there is a real-world example that makes this global balancing act more understandable.

There is a long and often complex procedure that arrives at a set of standards, recognised officially, that ensures something will be accessible right across the Internet.

After a very long, often difficult process, that standard for including the world's languages has now been put forward to the one organisation that can formally enter it into the Internet — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), based in California.

ICANN has put out a formal request for comments as a final precaution. And once that process is finished, then everyone has to figure out how to actually make the standards work with the existing Internet infrastructure — another daunting task already under way. The truly global Internet is on its way. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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