EXPERTS at a United Nations forum on Internet governance have warned that the predominant use of English on the worldwide web needs to be stopped before it crowds out other languages, Agence France-Presse has reported.
Participants at the forum, which was held in Athens, fear that forms of cultural knowledge that took centuries of human progress to build could be lost for ever.
"Some 90 per cent of 6,000 languages (at use today) are not represented on the Internet," said Yoshinori Imai of NHK, the Japanese broadcasting corporation.
"These people could be left out in a desert of no information and no knowledge," he said.
In countries such as Colombia and Senegal, oral tradition and cultural heritage that could be used for research and education purposes may never reach the broader world, sociologists and linguists said at the four-day forum.
"A large part of the population are voiceless because they cannot share information," said Adama Samassekou, president of the African Academy of Languages in Mali.
"Every time a language dies, a vision of the world disappears," Samassekou said.
"Even in the research field there's a linguistic bias, English is far and away the dominant language," added Divina Frau-Meigs, a professor of media sociology at the University of Sorbonne in Paris.
When it comes to creating sites with non-English content, users in many countries face difficulty because HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) computer language for creating web pages largely uses English words and abbreviations, explained Bernard Benhamou, senior lecturer on the information society at the Political Sciences Institute in Paris.
"For (Westerners) this does not mean much, but for a user who doesn't speak English it's a hell of a task," he told AFP.
In one case in Cambodia, the local Internet community developed its own software in Khmer after being turned down by a software developer, said Markus Kummer, chairman of the United Nations working group on Internet governance.
Initiatives to diversify language use on the Internet are undertaken by various countries at the local level.
But the United Nations and other organizations such as ICANN(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.), the non-profit organization that manages the Internet's technical root, are aware of the fact that fragmentation could occur if this issue is not adequately addressed.
If that were to happen, experts say that typing an Internet address would produce different links depending on the user's geographical location, while email would get hopelessly lost en route.
"The risk of fragmentation today is low, but if were to occur it would be really bad," said Patrick Faelstroem, a senior consulting engineer at Cisco Systems and a member of the Swedish government's IT policy and strategy group.
"It would mean that if you send me an email from Greece, I may not be able to even reply to you from Sweden," Faelstroem added.
Delegates to the forum are calling for more internationalization, saying English enjoys an unfair Internet monopoly. When the pioneering engineers who invented the Internet began crafting the modern domain name system, they came up with a rule that was reasonable at the time: Domains must use only English characters. But delegates complained that the choice was representative of an Internet culture that is far too English-centric and that fails to respect other languages.
