Human-Algorithmic Scaffolding

Many of the changes that condition cultural and linguistic diversity today are inseparable from the co-evolution of technology and humans. This chapter focuses on linguistic diversity and assesses developments to that end at the intersection of language and technology. This is an area that has recently experienced a historical infrastructural shift: from a monolingual-only to a multilingual-ready Internet. Take the Web giants Wikipedia and Google as examples, which currently support about 300 languages, and compare this to traditional broadcasting media such as the BBC World Service, which currently serves 28 languages. This shift has allowed more people to become new Internet users, most of whom demand support for languages other than English. Figure 9.1 shows not only the contrast in the world’s Internet population between 1996 and 2012, but also the most recent reality: almost 90 percent of all Internet users live outside of the US, with a large proportion of Internet traffic generated outside North America in 2012.