Comparisons of the Incidence of a
Selection of Words in WWW Pages on the Internet.
This is an exercise without pretention; a
first attempt at approximate quantification of the presence of France on the Internet, in
the forms of its language and its culture. It is also an attempt to test the reality of a
"cultural preference'' in the Internet towards North Americans. The method consists
of counting, with the aid of a keyword search tool, the number of citations of a word or
name among the "information resources'' available through the World Wide Web (WWW,
Web, or W3).
Considering the location of the investigator,
we have integrated some criteria concerning hispanic culture, and the Dominican Republic
in particular.
The count was made of resources available
through WWW (HTML), and the research was made with a very strong keyword search tool. This
tool is Alta Vista, which is
offered for free access by Digital Equipment Corporation. We looked up the words without
accents and we chose them to avoid "semantic collisions.''
The keywords are selected according to
criteria of strong cultural or linguistic significance, and according to a variety of
themes.
Click here to
view a table of the keywords and the results of our count.
The results are to be taken solely as an
order of magnitude; they can't be considered as strong statistics. With prudence, it is
thus possible to estimate that English is, on average, 20 times more used than French on
the Internet; and Spanish two times less than French. The variance is high, and it is
possible to see some cases where French approaches English (and in one case even goes far
past it!). These situations appear in domains where French culture is the strongest. The
themes where French seems to be in a position markedly better than the mean are:
- francophony (who is surprised?)
- food, wines, cheeses, and perfumes, of course;
but not in cooking recipes!
Other themes where French seems to be in a
position better than the mean are:
- Science and technology (good!)
Themes where French is in a difficult
position are:
- sex (the reconversion of the minitel rose
remains to be done!)
- business (attention! danger!)
- other languages (surprise! English-speaking
Internauts give us lessons in solidarity with other languages and cultures).
From these data, and considering other
factors (such as the number of languages most used on the Internet).
It is possible to estimate very
roughly that between 60% and 80% of the "resources'' of the World Wide Web are in
English, and between 3% and 4% in French.
In conclusion, the problem of the
insufficient presence of the French language is real, but the magnitude is less than
certain figures previously speculated (90% for English). In any case, the solution is
simple and ready to hand: transform yourselves from spectators into actors...
To reverse the trend, francophones must (as
must other languages and cultures) construct their own information resources that reflect
their own languages and cultures.
And here's a surprise: Paris appears in web
pages only twice as seldom as New York! The "hit parade'' (oh, pardon, the
classification...) that follows in the second part will clarify why
this is. |
