“I saw a commercial on late night TV, it said, ‘Forget everything you know about slipcovers!’ So I did. It was a load off my mind! Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, but I didn’t know what the fuck they were!” – Mitch Hedberg

Although I’ve always been reading it, I had never put my hands on Wikipedia before. Turns out the interface is kind of messy; everything is user-generated, but sometimes not so user-friendly. Before I could get to writing I had been going in circles (metaphorically speaking) for a while and my click finger was getting bored. Eventually, I was able to start playing in my personal sandbox and start working on my entry.
Being a stand-up fan and unhappy with the information provided by the italian wiki, I thought I might start with one of the many american comedians who had a lot going on media-wise, like Dave Chappelle. I was thinking the whole Africa thing and the Oprah interview were perfect material to contribute spreading the word on enlighted comedians in my country (an often difficult ground for those who dissent, no matter how comicly).
The italian entry for Chappelle is kinda slim, and it needs some plumping up. However, I wound up creating a page from scratch, and I did it for Mitch Hedberg. The guy was hilarious and acted like only a sincere person in showbiz can do, confused out of his mind. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to his postumous Do You Believe In Gosh?, but it’s never enough.
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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…)