overgenomen uit Financial Times, 6 december 2001 (http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3FZJZWWUC&live=true&useoverridetemplate=IXL8L4VRRBC&tagid=FTDDMJNIFEC)
index nieuwsberichten

 

Chinese tipped as main language of web by 2007

By Frances Williams in Geneva - Dec 06 2001 18:32:52

Chinese will outrank English as the most-used language on the worldwide web by 2007, according to forecasts cited on Thurday at a United Nations symposium on multilingual internet addresses.

At present a slim majority of the world's 460m-plus internet users are from English-speaking backgrounds. This reflects the system's origin and development in the US, but is changing rapidly as internet use spreads internationally.

As early as next year most internet users will have a mother tongue other than English and by 2003 a third of web users will be using another language online, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) said. Wipo is jointly organising the two-day Geneva meeting with the International Telecommunication Union.

Despite the proliferation of languages on the web, until recently the registration of internet addresses or "domain names" was restricted to certain Latin (basically English) characters. New technologies now permit the use of non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Arabic, as well as accents used in many European languages.

But multilingual domain names pose technical problems, for registrars and other internet operators, as well as administrative and policy issues.

Multilingual addresses also look set to multiply disputes over the use of trademarks as domain names.

Wipo, which runs an online dispute settlement system enabling trademark owners to reclaim sites from cybersquatters, has received 24 non-Latin script domain names for adjudication.

But Francis Gurry, Wipo's legal counsel, points out that trademark disputes will be vastly more complex if arbitrators have to trawl through trademark registrations in different scripts. Seperately on Thursday, Gabon became the 30th country to ratify a 1996 Wipo treaty defining the copyright obligations of internet users and operators, enabling it to come into force in March.



© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2001.