Brenda Danet (Professor Emerita, Hebrew University of Jerusalum) and Susan Herring (Professor, SLIS) have published The Multilingual Internet:
The Oxford University Press describes the book as follows:
"Two thirds of global Internet users are non-English speakers. Despite this, most scholarly literature on the Internet and computer-mediated-communication (CMC) focuses exclusively on English. This is the first book devoted to analyzing Internet related CMC in languages other than English.
The volume collects 18 new articles on facets of language and Internet use, all of which revolve around several central topics: writing systems, the structure and features of local languages and how they affect internet use, code switching between multiple languages, gender issues, public policy issues, and so on. The scope of languages discussed in the volume is unusually broad, including non- native English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Thai, and Portuguese. This book will be of great interest to anyone studying linguistics, applied linguistics, communication, anthropology and information sciences.
The book's back cover includes a quote from Naomi S. Baron (American University, Washington, D.C.):
"A milestone contribution to Internet research, edited by two leading scholars in the field. The Multilingual Internet provides a much-needed global perspective on computer-mediated communication. This book is sure to become a classic in Internet literature."
Chapters address Internet communication in Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and other languages. Chapter 18 "How Much Multilingualism? Language Diversity on the Internet" is by SLIS faculty member John Paolillo.
For an overview of the book chapters, see: Table of Contents
The book is dedicated to "Jacques Anis (January 8, 1953 - December 16, 2005), whose research on computer-mediated communication in French was perhaps the first large, coherent body of work to apply linguistic methods of analysis to online communication in a language other than English."
Posted May 03, 2007