In one of the last scenes of Werner Herzog‘s Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) an Aborigine stands up in a court room to speak up against some mineral excavations happening in a sacred tribal ground. The judge asks for a translation, but nobody can provide it. The man is called “the Mute”, being the last living member of his village and the only one in the world left speaking his native language.
This saddening scenario may not just be a relevant piece of cinema, but a likely future for many of today’s less technology-savvy linguistic minorities.
Although there are diverging opinions about it, there are from 4,000 to 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, but on the internet English reigns as an unquestioned king (enlightened, yet patronizing), since the first bit was transmitted back in the ’60s. Nevertheless, despite it being the globalization’s lingua franca, more languages and some interesting linguistic phenomena have been emerging on the net in the past years, drawing the attention of linguists and media scholars.
The Multilingual Internet, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Brenda Danet and Susan C. Herring, is a very interesting and significative attempt at making sense of such phenomena, in both their novelty and urgency. (more…)