Last Friday, October 30, the internet opened a new chapter in its long march towards internationalization. It entered a new era of multilingual globalization. Up to now, web addresses could only be displayed using Latin characters. This increasingly makes little sense as more than half of the world's 1.6 billion internet users employ non-Latin scripts including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, and Russian.
It stands to reason that this is the future of the internet as the world of the Latin alphabet is near exhaustion although there is considerable room for expansion in the Latinized parts of Africa and Latin America. Applications for non-Latin international domain names will be accepted from November 16 and become operational from mid-2010. From 26 characters of the Latin alphabet, ten numerals and a hyphen that have been used in domain names, 100,000 new characters will be added for internet domain names, which will allow billions of people around the world to access the internet using their own languages.
The new global internet regime was approved by the International Corporation for Domain Names and Numbers (ICANN) at the end of its conference in Seoul, South Korea. Located in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, a couple of miles from where I currently live and work, ICANN has been under pressure to make the technical changes to globalize and democratize the internet ever since its formation in 1998 as a non-profit regulator of the internet under the broad supervision of the US government.
This is the biggest change in the history of the internet in forty years since the web migrated from the military and academy to commerce and the public. Before the vote by the board, ICANN's president, Rod Beckstrom, proclaimed with boisterousness that was not entirely misplaced: "This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world." After the unanimous vote, he called it a "historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet...We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia."
The shift in the demographic outreach and lingo-technical architecture of the internet is welcomed in many parts of the world. To them it represents a belated recognition of the vast cultural worlds that exist beyond Western Europe and its colonial offshoots, another sign of the declining civilizational hegemony of Latin Euroamerica. But Euroamerica is itself fractured; the European Union has long complained about ICANN's continued location in the U.S. and ties to the U.S. government. To the advocates of the internet's globalization including many in Europe, the recent changes do not go far enough in truly internationalizing the governance of the internet.
But not everyone is enamored by these changes. Opponents especially in the United States tend to couch their criticisms in terms of cybersecurity and the dangers posed for brand names. To quote The New York Times, "allowing internationalized domain names in languages like Arabic, Russian and Chinese could make it more difficult to fight cyberattacks, including malicious redirects and hacking. But Icann said it was ready for the challenge."
These changes present opportunities and challenges for the Pan-African world. Many Africans and peoples of African descent use non-Latin scripts among them speakers of Arabic and users of Arabic script. The majority of the world's speakers of Arabic are in Africa, a fact often concealed in the colonial cartographic construction of the Middle East in which northern Africa is excised from the continent. The use of Arabic script--ajami--has an old history in western and eastern Africa. Ethiopia also boasts an ancient history of writing in a non-Latin script that survives to this day.
For Africans and African diasporas using Latin scripts, the need to develop multilingualism cannot be overemphasized, by which I mean the ability both to speak several languages and use several scripts. Many educated Africans, almost by definition, are bilingual, but their bilingualism is often confined to an African indigenous language and an European colonial language using the Latin script, while many diasporan Africans especially those in the Atlantic world tend to be monolingual confined to the languages of their nations of residence and citizenship. African diasporas in the Indian Ocean world tend to reflect the multilingual imperatives of colonialism.
The linguistic challenges for continental Africans of course vary depending on the history and locations of their countries. The first challenge concerns the need to learn languages from other regions-Swahili in West Africa, Arabic in Southern Africa, Yoruba in East Africa, for example. There is also the need to learn the languages of Africa's diasporas. If I were to restrict myself to the diasporas of the Americas, this would include English, Spanish, and Portuguese for those in Francophone Africa, and Spanish, Portuguese, and French for those in Anglophone Africa. Moreover, African educational institutions have to take more seriously the teaching of the major Asian languages especially Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi, if for no other reason than that Asia will be more important economically and geopolitically for Africa in the 21st century than Europe. It makes sense to understand the language of your major trading partners.
For diasporan Africans, the challenges also vary according to their location and history. If I can confine myself to the historic U.S. African American population, going beyond their monololingualism entails learning the languages of the other African diasporas in the Americas--Spanish and Portuguese. This can help erode the racialized and manufactured antagonisms between them and so-called Hispanics (who can be of any race), many of whom are peoples of African descent but are constructed as different based on language and national origins. It also entails learning the major African languages seriously--from Amharic to Arabic to Hausa to Lingala to Swahili to Yoruba to Zulu--beyond Kwanzaa phrases. As the languages of many of Africa's new diasporas in the U.S., learning these languages offers new cultural possibilities for reconnection and cultural dialogue between these diasporas and between them and the continent. Finally, the African diasporas, like their continental counterparts, need to learn the major languages of Asia.
Africans and African diasporas are already a globalized people through historical events and encounters that were not often of their own choosing. Acquisition of global multiligualism is essential for their survival and success in the transnational world of the 21st century. Even the internet is catching up with this brave new world in which monolingualism in the Latinized European languages is no longer sufficient for the essential intercultural, economic, social, and political literacies of the 21st century.
First written November 1, 2009
