Ethan Zuckerman at WorldChanging has posted a thoughtful discussion of ‘The Survival of Languages in a Digital Age.’ He touches on several interesting aspects and suggestions. Here is a sample:

There’s a tendency, I think, to believe that the spread of the Internet and the desktop computer is inherently connected to the global spread of the English language. (That was certainly my assumption fifteen years ago as I played with early internet systems.) But we’re starting to discover that this is a fallacy. There are now more blog posts per day in Japanese than in English, and there may be even more Chinese bloggers. (While Technorati does a great job of counting blogs that contact pingservers to let them know about updated blogs, many Chinese blogs don’t use these services and tend to get undercounted.) As I wrote about last week, when a large number of users who speak a particular language come online, they seem to start talking to each other in their native tongue, rather than in a second tongue.

But the slow spread of the Internet in many African nations suggests that it may be a while before Wolof speakers are writing in that language instead of in French. And the smaller the language, the longer it takes to establish a community online‚Ķ and, generally speaking, the higher the chance that most speakers of the language don’t have regular internet access. Some African languages will not survive in a digital era.