UNESCO and the long tail

novembre 4th, 2005 Desactiva els comentaris

Oh My News
The United Nations for Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has stated that nearly half of the 6,000 languages spoken today on the planet run the risk of disappearing this century, possibly aggravated by the use of new technologies such as the Internet

“Three of each four pages on the Internet are written in English. Nevertheless, the number of web surfers whose mother tongue is not English exceeds 50 percent, a percentage that continues enlarging,” states the document.

To affirm something like that one must be a complete ignorant or a strong technophobe, maybe at the UNESCO they are both.

It is obvious that internet is reinforcing the role of English as lingua franca, but this does not mean that English will kill every other language in the world. In fact, the net is helping many languages to survive.

How is this possible?

Well, it is not difficult to explain if you know what the long tail is. The Wikipedia explains us this concept:

The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions. (…) In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually “tails off”. In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events—the long tail, represented here by the yellow portion of the graph— can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority.

So, in this case, English, Chinese, Spanish, etc. are populating the red zone of the distribution, and, obviously, are being reinforced, but, at the same time, small languages, like Danish, Catalan (which is my language), Basque, Esperanto are populating the yellow one, and there is no reason for that to change.

Bitsenbloc