Alex around the World

Here’s the word of the week: multilingualism, courtesy of Wikipedia community:

A multilingual person is, in the broadest definition of multilingualism, anyone with communicative skills in more than one language, be it active or passive. More specifically, the terms bilingual and trilingual are used to describe comparable situations in which two or three languages are involved.

See also: Linguistic diversity on the Internet.

As far as I can remember, English has always been “the” language used on the Internet (See: “Languages of the Internet“), although it is not the most spoken language on earth, but the second one, far behind Chinese, also known as Mandarin. Probably for historical reasons, because the first language used was English, spoken among scientists. Maybe also because the Internet started to be used by the general public in the United States, during the beginning of the e-business era.Anyways, the fact is, today, around one third of the Internet users are English speakers. I don’t know if figures about the distribution of websites by language are (i.e. what percent of English websites, of French websites, etc.), but I guess English is way ahead of other languages. Take me for example, although Spanish is my mother tongue and French the language I use every day, my website is in English…In the recent years, I’ve noticed a small sociolinguistic revolution, where other languages tried to counter the fact that English was becoming the “only” language in some fields of work (natural and human sciences, ICT, music, etc.). It is a necessary step if some cultures want to keep their identity. Indeed, there’s a close relationship between language and culture (they usually always go together).That’s why many international organizations, such as the United Nations (UN, with 6 official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) European Union (EU, speaking 20 official languages) have the linguistic diversity as a central element. For example, “Article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, adopted by EU leaders in 2000, says that the Union shall respect linguistic diversity [...]“. As for the UN, all “[d]ocuments are produced in the six official languages and are issued simultaneously when all the language versions are available.“Multilingualism is something that really needs to be developed in as much companies and organizations as possible, because is a open door to other cultures and views of the world.Speaking about multilingualism, here’s more: UNESCO: Measuring Linguistic Diversity on the Internet

I have 3 computers: a game-and-design-oriented PC at home, a professional workstation and my laptop at work. The first applications I launch after I boot any of these machines are Firefox and Thunderbird. Then, I browse some of the reference websites: boxes and arrows, digital web, a list apart or web break stuff, among many others.At the same time, I check some feeds I have subscribed to: 456BereaStreet, cre8d design, Jeffrey Veen (non exhaustive list).It’s a typical case of information overflow (see post on this week’s “word of the week“): I get too much information as input and don’t have enough time to process it. Some call it also technostress.As a result, I have decided to refrain from adding more items to my del.icio.us list and to my feeds. Sometimes I tend to forget that life is not only about the web…

Information overload is the word that I have selected this week. I realised it could be a good featured word since I feel particularly “technostressed” these days.Her goes the intro from Wikipedia:

Information overload refers to the state of having too much information to make a decision or remain informed about a topic. This term is usually used in conjunction with various forms of computer-mediated communication such as electronic mail. Large amounts of currently available information, a high rate of new information being added, contradictions in available information, a low signal-to-noise ratio, and inefficient methods for comparing and processing different kinds of information can all contribute to this effect.

Read the full article and my related post.