9 December 2016
Tech is upending the ways we write, speak, and even think
You are reading this article in English, but there are around 7,100 known living languages around the globe, according to Ethnologue. You wouldn’t know it from browsing the World Wide Web, though. We like to think of the web as a diverse place filled with the world’s knowledge, but only a fraction of active languages spoken around the globe are online at present. English and other dominant languages have a stranglehold on the internet, explained linguist and mathematician András Kornai in a recent scientific paper titled “Digital Language Death.” The future for a language that isn’t properly maintained and spoken online may not be rosy.