Languages of the World (Wide Web)

Fantastic research from Google:
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/07/languages-of-world-wide-web.html

makes you wonder about bilingualism and the web. bilingualism is supposed to be very common, for example in Finland, Russian is still studied and spoken I believe. But the links don't seem to reflect that.

And it makes you wonder too about the 'language of the page'. how many sites have more than one language on a page? If not many, then why?
they do exist, review pages on LT would be an example. Another would be this:
http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/12012349302692339238/bundle/Latin

I can't think of many books that have mixed languages outside of journals.
It is really fascinating research. Internet text is a linguist's delight because people self-publish content, so it will be interesting to see if it follows similar trends to traditionally published material, or shows new trends.

One sort of mixed-language book is a translation that has the original text as well. Several editions of Dante's Divine Comedy have that - the original on one page, the translation on the facing page. I think the Elder Eddas have been done the same way - and Chaucer. But I don't know if there's any equivalent on web pages.

2> Well, there are people who study and speak Russian in Finland, seeing Russia is a huge neighbour, but Russian isn't a widespread language there, not like it was in the 19th Century when Finland was a Russian Grand Duchy, and even then it was only a tiny minority that spoke it, I believe. I'm certain Swedish has always been more widespread, it definitely is today despite only 5.5% being native Swedish speakers.

Hey, binders, I like your library!

I never came across Russian speakers on a visit to Finland, but I think Swedish is compulsory in school.

My guess on Finnish is actually that they're mixing up Estonian and Finnish. They are, I understand, quite close, and there are certainly many Estonians who know Russian.

The Philippines are a former British colony? I bet that's news to them!

Yes, Estonian and Finnish are mutually intelligible to someone who speaks one of the two and has spent some weeks studying the other one. And certainly a large chunk of Estonia's population speaks Russian.

>7 suitable1:

Yes, I liked that too. Google people are super-bright, but they aren't as well rounded as they ought to be.

That comment ties neatly in with a proposal in Sweden last week from the National Employers' Association that students who pick humanities should receive less state funding (to summarise), because they are destined to become unemployed.

Ouch!

I'm sorry - I got stuck on the first sentence: 'The web is vast and infinite'. Surely, the words 'vast and' are simply redundant here, or am I missing something? Is there a sense in which 'vast' is not subsumed by 'infinite'?

Such things are bound to cast doubt on the intellectual depth of the subsequent stuff.

Well, vast as it is (and likely getting vaster by the moment), the web is not, and never will be, infinite. There is, Clifford, a distinction, and "vast" and "itsy-bitsy" are both subsumed by "infinite," except in the more colloquial (and hyperbolic) use of "infinite."

But then, I was a mathematics major, and "infinite," to me, has some technical and quite definite meanings.

The end of the Internet

That would be better if it didn't stick you in a loop. Luckily, it's easy to leave. Back in the dark ages, computers had to use timers to interrupt endless loops. I used to program, and, to my embarrassment, wrote more than one endless loop.

Ok TS--You're a great guy but ya gotta take responsibly for the sites you put up for us to read. So I'm saying to you--diagram the following sentence.

"--We can use our corpus to draw a very simple graph of the web, with a node for each language and an edge between two languages if more than one percent of the offsite links in the first language land on pages in the second.--"

DO WHAT ??????

Go ahead, diagram it?

I sure won't even bother to ask you what in the devil she/he was trying to say here. I'll bet that not even his mother could tell you the answer to that one.

One of our local writers said that a good writer is one who can "keep it simple". They gave him the Nobel Prize, but then who knows, maybe this guy/gall knows better.

Hey folks --TS really is a great guy. This one was just too good to pass up. Sorry fella. (Not really)

BTW--I thought graphs were drawn with pencils. Draw with your corpus?? Is that sorta like writing in the snow by using you___Oops never mind.

2> A very large proportion of Austrian websites have at least some of the pages available in English as well as German. Generally not on the same page, though.

I have many books with more than one language. Besides the books with original (usually ancient) language and English or German on facing page, I have many travel photo books with text in several languages. Many academic books written in German have an English summary at the end. I have also seen academic anthologies with articles in whatever language the particular person wrote in.

travel books and brochures with many pictures and not too much text quite often have the same text repeated in 3-4 languages.

Yes, Lonely Planet's India or Western Europe phrasebooks have over 10 languages in a pocket-sized book ...

For all these books it would be an enormous help if we could enter more than one secondary language.

I am not always sure how to fill in languages for a tri-lingual Swiss book, so I would also like more than one secondary language.