Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more conscious about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language, but in different languages. In our modern world, each nation state has adopted more or less one language for its own use. I see in the future of the Internet a greater use of different languages and multilingual pages, not a simple gravitation to American English, and a more creative use of multilingual computer translation. Ninety nine percent of the Webs created in Japan are written in Japanese!"
Maintained on the website of the College Sabhal Mór Ostaig, Island of Skye, Scotland, by Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle, European Minority Languages is a list of minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. The site also gives links to other sites dealing with the same subject worldwide.
Caoimhín P. Ó Donnaíle wrote in her e-mail of August 18, 1998:
"— The Internet has contributed and will contribute to the wildfire spread of
English as a world language.
— The Internet can greatly help minority languages, but this will not happen by itself. It will only happen if people want to maintain the language as an aim in itself.
— The Web is very useful for delivering language lessons, and there is a big demand for this.
— The Unicode (ISO 10646) character set standard is very important and will greatly assist in making the Internet more multilingual."
3.3. Dictionaries and Glossaries
There are more and more on-line dictionaries. Let us give three examples
(English, French and multilingual).
In Merriam-Webster Online: the Language Center, a main publisher of English dictionaries gives free access to a collection of on-line resources. The goal is to help track down definitions, spellings, pronunciations, synonyms, vocabulary exercises, and other key facts about words and language. The main on-line resources are: WWWebster Dictionary, WWebster Thesaurus, Webster's Third (a lexical landmark), Guide to International Business Communications, Vocabulary Builder (with interactive vocabulary quizzes), and the Barnhart Dictionary Companion (hot new words).