A 2000 study noted that the major threat to linguistic diversity on the Internet is a multilingualism that is limited to a handful of major world languages, supported by machine translation, to the detriment of the great majority of smaller languages. The real danger comes from a facade of linguistic diversity that includes some dominant languages but excludes all others. Figure 4 confirms this trend, with minor changes in percentages among the same ten dominant languages. However, while the use in cyberspace of English and Chinese diminished slightly, the share of ‘other languages’ grew, but this composite figure does not give information about the possible marginalisation of certain lesser-used languages.
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