multilingualism and the internet

This is my entry for the IndieWeb carnival this month on the topic of Multilingualism in a Global Web. Version en français de l’article ici.

Some background: multilingualism as a side effect

I derive a lot of pride and a lot of cringe from speaking several languages, in the exact same way that I am very proud and vaguely ashamed of being proud of being French.

I grew up in Québec, with French parents who were very intent on 1. exposing me to English as much as possible 2. telling me exactly how unrefined and bastardized French Québécois is. I’m really glad that Québec has French protection rules and they were forced to send me to a French-speaking school where I got to interact with francophone kids. Of this, I will only say: Snobbery bad. As a result, my Québécois French is very rusty (it’s been 20 years after all) and I try to listen to québécois podcasts and interact with québécois people as much as possible to regain some of my old fluency. As a kid, I thought I was bilingual, as I spoke both French French and Québécois French.

Then, we moved back to France, and suddenly I was bilingual because I spoke both English and French − my English was nowhere near native level, but also very far away from the English spoken by my classmates, and eventually, with a lot of hard work during the holidays, I entered an international high school where most of my friends were native English speakers. By the end of high school, I considered myself actually bilingual.

In high school, I was also a skater, and we went to a bunch of international competitions, so I got to work on my Italian, my German, and also my English with a bunch of different accents involved, whether from Great Britain or as the lingua franca.

Other languages got thrown into the mix − speaking French and Italian, I understand written Spanish relatively well, and speaking English and some German, I can also make my way through a Dutch text. I’ve spent four months in Shanghai for my student exchange and could actually have a simple conversation in Mandarin by the end of it, which I’ve entirely forgotten since then. I did a year of Russian, which led me nowhere, my only true language-learning failure.

I’m very proud of speaking several languages well, and I’m also very conscious that none of my languages come only from hard work. I speak English because my parents put my English skills above everything else (and then my entire work life was geared towards English, and then my social life, and then some of my romantic life as well); I speak Italian because I was so miserable as a teen that most of my friends were from across the border; I speak German because I spent a year there. Being multilingual is really mostly a sign of my financial privilege.

Anyway, the stage is set, you know which languages I speak. This has a few consequences as well, and the most negative and pressing one in my opinion is that I’m used to understanding stuff in a handful of languages, so I forget that auto-translate exists and I just ignore things in languages I don’t speak, since those occurrences tend to be rare. This sucks! I need to do better!

Two more elements that are absolutely necessary to understand what comes next:

• I’m patriotic. As in, I’m very much aware that I’m French only because I was born in the right place of the right parents. But also, I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world (I’ve tried) and I’m incredibly proud of my people. Again, that’s mostly because people 300, 100, or 60 years ago, French or not, did some really cool stuff that set the stage for our social system today. That’s why I get so annoyed when we collectively fuck up, by the way − I’m proud of my country and want to have good reason to be proud. I consider myself patriotic, not nationalist.
• I worked in localization for a while. The whole point of my job was to escape the « English as default language on the Internet » paradigm. I even worked on Meta AI’s No Language Left Behind initiative on endangered languages.

Dammit, why is this post in English?

This post, like many others on my blog, is in English. The main reasons:

• more of my readers speak English than readers who speak French, either as a first or foreign language.
• at this point in my life, about half of my thoughts are in English because my job is in English, my blog post consumption (but not news consumption) is in English, and pretty much all of the videos I consume are in English.
• the prompt was in English so I realized mid-way through the introduction that I could technically not have written the answer in English.

The Internet was designed as « not a place ». The whole thought behind the Internet was to remove all boundaries, all frontiers, all physical constraints.

My CEO is going to love this because he uses any chance he gets to quote the declaration of independence of the cyberspace and now I’m doing it too:

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

And since I’m aping my CEO already, let me keep going: to this declaration, we reply that data needs to be material again. We need to create places on the Internet, not put it in the open as an abstract concept without limits.

The cozy corners of group chats are our vague solution − in my group chats, I can speak French knowing that non-French-speakers will simply not be there − but they don’t solve the question for the Internet as a whole.

I think what comes closest to places right now is Fediverse instances: on Lemmy, I have an account on the French-France instance jlai.lu and can interact with non-French and non-France instances and communities, while still signalling that I’m from this instance. You know where I’m from. If I choose not to be from French-France, I can choose to be from gay or from Linux or from communism; in my case, the geographic and linguistic instance was what brought me the most solid sense of identity, and I chose that one.

The more I think about it, the more I think my issue has never been English as a dominant language so much as American cultural hegemony. Because to be fair, I don’t mind news about France that are in English (I crave them, in fact, because they usually offer an interesting outside perspective), but news in French about the damn political election in a country a continent away are at least as aggravating than when they’re in English. In other words, English-World is fine, French-World is great, English-France is fun, French-USA is insufferable.

I hope this rambling made you understand my meaning: in localization, we use four-letter locales and not two letters (fr_FR is different from fr_CA which is different from fr_BE, itself very different from fr_DZ) because language matters but so does cultural context.

And currently, the Internet tends to flatten both of these, so we conflate « English as the main lingua franca » with « how horribly and depressingly flat the Internet sometimes feels ».

What do?

I don’t know! But let’s try.

More of our own languages

We can focus on our own languages, by trying to keep our blogs balanced. Or we can decide that our blog will only be on our own language: for 10 years, with Réussir Mes Études, I decided that I would only write in French, specifically for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t check English-language resources. I’m really proud of that one, because it was one of very few resources in French especially in the early years. (It also made my blog a big fish in a small pond, where I would never have gotten a living wage from the same blog in English, so the incentive to do this isn’t only personal values, if you’re monetizing.)

We can remember that most people who have the resources to read what we write also have the resources to throw it into DeepL or another translation engine, so we may not need a lingua franca anymore. I’m always very happy when Sara takes the time to send me an email or comment in French, and I’m also happy to throw her Slovenian posts into a translation engine. In that way, we can fight the assumption I made above of « people speak English more » − unless what I’m saying takes a great deal of nuance, they’ll understand well enough with auto-translation.

We can take the time to translate our blog posts ourselves (I did this on my news consumption article) and to translate worthwhile content by other people into our language. We can make sure that our companies translate their assets and documentation into at least one non-English locale.

We can participate in our own language’s space: try to always reply in our own language to someone from our linguistic background, maintain a blogroll for our language… (If you know a blogroll in Italian, by the way, please tell me: it’s been hard to find good stuff in Italian (including podcasts and videasts!) and I wish I had more opportunities to practice.)

We can also ask WordPress to support multilingual blogs instead of relying on a mediocre tagging system, but I haven’t fixed that one yet!

Curiosity

For those of us whose native language has spread across the world through colonization (and, by the way, is still enforced by neo-colonialism), it may be time to dive into how our language evolved and what interesting use is made of it outside of our cultural sphere. For French, here are some resources I enjoyed: music changing French in Côte d’Ivoire, P’tit Belliveau’s songs in Acadian, Louisiana French making a comeback…

If we like to learn new stuff, we can get into esperanto if we speak a European language. We can be curious about fun languages like toki pona. We can « simply » get the basics of a new language, just because.

We can also do a bit of techno-optimism (yes, yes!) and dive into a whole new AI-enabled language preservation world. And when we encounter a cool bilingual blog, we can try and auto-translate the posts to open ourselves to a whole new part of the Internet.

Post-scriptum: Twitter

A few times along the 2010s, I tried to create an English-language and a French-language Twitter account so that people could easily follow one or the other. I always ended up abandoning the English-language one, because it turned out that for most of my Twitter activity, I mostly wrote in French but more often replied in English, and maintaining two accounts was very confusing. Twitter’s dead to me now, but I thought that was interesting and didn’t know where to put it in the article. Here it is.