The Multilingual Internet

Abstract

Although English is the de facto lingua franca of the Internet, most Internet users are not native speakers of English. Two-thirds of the one billion users now online communicate in other languages, in non-native English, or both. Yet the English-based scholarly literature on computer-mediated communication (CMC) does not reflect this diversity. This book analyzes text-based CMC in multiple languages other than native English. Its eighteen chapters, most of them case studies focusing on a particular language or multilingual situation, address a range of topics: writing systems and the Internet ... More