LINGUIST List 6.1662

Sun Nov 26 1995

Disc: Linguistic Diversity

Editor for this issue: Helen Dry <hdryemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Anton Sherwood, Linguistic Diversity on the Internet

Benjamin Ao <baofirstbyte.davd.com> looked at Usenet's soc.culture.*
groups, found 82 out of 116 recent postings were in English, and drew
some conclusions which, I believe, are not warranted for Usenet in
general.

The Big Seven (news, comp, sci, soc, rec, talk, misc) speak English
almost exclusively; many other languages used in the national
hierarchies, some of which are quite large. I found recent articles
in the following languages in the listed hierarchies (which admittedly
do not propagate everywhere):

	Chinese: chinese, hk, hkstar, nctu, ntnu, ntu, tw, twbbs
	Danish: dk
	Finnish: finet, sfnet, hy
	Flemish: belnet, iae, nl, nlnet, xs4all
	French: fnet, fr, francom, mtl, nb.francais, qc
	German: at, blindnet, bln, braunschweig, chemnitz, cl,
		de, deceiver, dnet, entropie, fido, gay-net,
		ger, hannover, hannet, ka, kiel, maus, pfalz,
		ping, rhein-main, schule, stgt, t-netz, z-netz, zer
	Italian: it
	Japanese: fj, jp, jpmed, kansai, kanto, okinawa, page, pin, tnn
	Korean: han
	Norwegian: no
	Polish: pl
	Portuguese: br, brasil, pt
	Russian?: relcom, cs-monolit
	Slovak?: sk
	Spanish: chile
	Swedish: nordunet, sunet, swnet, swipnet
	Ukrainan: ukr

(In a few cases I made an educated guess.)

: 4. English is by far the most popular language on the Internet, even
: if the subject matter is highly culturally and ethnically oriented.

No quarrel there.

Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DAShernetcom.com