The Multilingual Information Society (MLIS) Programme of the European Union promotes the linguistic diversity of the EU in the information society. It intends to raise awareness of and stimulate provision of multilingual services, tolerable conditions for the language industries, reduced cost of information transfer among languages and contribute to the promotion of linguistic diversity. The home page of the website is in English, and documents are issues in many of all 11 EU official languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
Linguistic pluralism and diversity are everybody's business, as explained in a petition launched by the European Committee for the Respect of Cultures and Languages in Europe (ECRCLE) "for a humanist and multilingual Europe, rich of its cultural diversity".
"Linguistic pluralism and diversity are not obstacles to the free circulation of men, ideas, goods and services, as would like to suggest some objective allies, consciously or not, of the dominant language and culture. Indeed, standardization and hegemony are the obstacles to the free blossoming of individuals, societies and the information economy, the main source of tomorrow's jobs. On the contrary, the respect for languages is the last hope for Europe to get closer to the citizens, an objective always claimed and almost never put into practice. The Union must therefore give up privileging the language of one group."
The full text of the petition is available on the Web in the 11 European official languages of the European Union. The ECRCLE also asks the revisors of the Treaty of the European Union to include in the text of the treaty the respect of national cultures and languages. The proposals are concrete. In particular, the petition asks the governments in each country to "teach the youth at least two, and preferably three foreign European languages; encourage the national audiovisual and musical industries; and favour the diffusion of European works."
In Language Futures Europe, Paul Treanor collects links on language policy, multilingualism, global language structures, and the dominance of English. The site starts with a comment on the structures of language. It offers texts and essays, sections on EU policy, national policies, and research sites, and links on the emerging "monolingual movement" in the United States.
In his e-mail of August 18, 1998, Paul Treanor sent his comments on the questions I sent him:
"First, you speak of the Web in the singular. As you may have read, I think 'THE WEB' is a political, not a technological concept. A civilization is possible with extremely advanced computers, but no interconnection. The idea that there should be ONE WEB is derived from the liberal tradition of the single open, preferably global market.
I already suggested that the Internet should simply be broken up, and that Europe should cut the links with the US, and build a systematically incompatible net for Europe. As soon as you imagine the possibility of multiple nets, the language issues you list in your study are often irrelevant. Remember that 15 years ago, everyone thought that there would be one global TV station, CNN. Now there are French, German, Spanish global TV channels. So the answer to your question is that the 'one web' will split up anyway: probably into these 4 components:
a) an internal US/Canadian anglophone net, with many of the original characteristics;
b) separate national nets, with limited outside links;