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THE PLACE OF LATIN LANGUAGES AND
CULTURES ON THE INTERNET
1. Prologue and
previous research
This study on the languages and cultures presence on the
Internet follows the research pursued by Funredes between 1995 and 1998 examining the
presence of French and Spanish on the Web. The basic methodological principle has been
kept : it consists in measuring the number of certain terms or names in targeted
languages, in some areas of the Internet information, and in analyzing the results. In
comparison with the previous studies, significant improvements have been introduced.
For the whole study :
- Systematic search of the related
works
- Extension to all the latin languages: Spanish, French,
Italian, Portuguese and Rumanian. This document exists in each of those languages, as well
as in English.
For the linguistic part :
- Basic linguistic methodology reinforced by the creation of a sample of terms that guarantees reliable
results.
- Definition of the intervals of realibility for the results of
the linguistic part.
- Extension of the research to the newsgroups (Usenet).
- Weighting of the results according to the world-wide presence
of each studied language.
For the cultural part :
- Comparison with the results of the previous studies and
analysis of the trends.
- Systemization of all the cultures concording to the Latin
languages : Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.
- Implementation of the basic methodology, improved by a more
coherent classification and a more varied list of people.
- Analysis of the presence of certain people (per language, and
then detailed in the frame of the person’s language reference).
The study will be published soon
References will be done to the previous stages of this study. In order to help
the reader, a synthesis of processes and results from the previous research, along with
corresponding Internet links, can be found in Appendix 1. |
