The Internet Didn’t Destroy Local Languages; It’s Helping Preserve Them

If you Google the question “Is the Internet killing local languages and cultures,” you will receive a lot of results that suggest the answer is yes. But if you look at them a bit more closely, you will see that the most dire warnings tend to be from 2010 to 2017. More recent results often take the opposite stance—that technology actually helps preserve local languages. Advances in machine translation are clearly part of this shift in opinion. But there are also important economic, geopolitical, and cultural forces at work. Languages have always evolved as if in a marketplace. They compete against one another, with shifting winners and losers over time. Having a common cross-country language (Latin, French, English) is useful in that it can facilitate understanding and lower transaction costs, especially as the world becomes more globally integrated. But the roles of local and shared languages are always shifting, and right now they’re tilting back toward the local. Viewed more abstractly, the world’s 7,000 languages can be grouped into three main categories. The 300 most widely spoken ones are used by 90 percent of the world’s population. The remaining 10 percent speak some 6,700 languages, many having little or no written form at all. A third group consists of the languages that dominate online. It’s estimated that just 20 languages account for some 95 percent of all Internet content, with nearly 60 percent of this content being in English. Machine translation will be a decisive factor in determining how these three groups relate to one another going forward.