Those in Quebec who are worried about the health of French cite digital platforms like Netflix and TikTok as threats. They are not wrong. But the problem is deeper. Because, despite a decade of effort, English still overwhelmingly dominates the global Internet.
The global village is certainly a place where English is the most common language. Enough to send the signal that without an understanding of English, no greeting. No wonder young people — generally more connected than their parents — adopt expressions in English more quickly than in any other language…
English dominates even in the way websites, e-mail addresses, etc. are programmed. Everything is based on the English alphabet in which there are no accented characters. Too bad for French, Spanish and Russian. So much the worse for Cree, Inuktitut and Ojibway.
CIRA Canada is responsible for registering domain names in Canada, which give their names to Internet addresses and websites. The organization, formerly known in French as ACEI (for Canadian Internet Registration Authority), launched a vast project in 2013 to include accented characters in the name of websites. Of more than 20,000 Canadian websites, 2000 today use so-called special characters.
The Web has more than one million websites. Half are hosted in the United States, in English.
serious accent
The English-speaking population represents 13% of the world’s population. On the Internet, English is used 60% of the time.
French content represents less than 4% of everything published on the Internet. About the same proportion of the world’s population speaks French, even if only a quarter of the 321 million French speakers consider French their mother tongue.
The Internet still has great difficulty accepting accented characters, which is a problem when writing other than in English. This problem is not exclusive to Quebec, nor even to the Francophonie, of course. The 400 million Spanish speakers are even less present than French speakers on the Web.
It is a problem. It is also an opportunity that the organization ISOC Québec is seizing to move the issue of universal accessibility into the digital sphere. ISOC Quebec is the Quebec chapter of the Internet Society, an organization promoting an open and inclusive Internet.
ISOC Québec and its partners — among them PointQuébec, which promotes the “.quebec” suffix for Quebec Internet domains — would like people to be able to write, without being disadvantaged on the Internet, the names of people, companies and places as they are spelled “in the real world”.
That you can, if you want to write him a good word, send an email to the eminent colleague Gérard Bérubé using the address gbérubé@ledevoir.com, rather than the “gberube” currently used.
The good news is that the technical means already exist to allow people to write on the Internet in their mother tongue, even if it is not English. Character banks are just waiting to be adopted by managers of the modern Internet, its Web servers, e-mail, and “others.”
put in the effort
“De-Anglicizing” the Internet is possible, even if it is probably tedious. Universal accessibility is desirable for several reasons that justify this effort, argue UNESCO and the member countries of La Francophonie. This is one of the objectives set by the Digital Francophonie Strategy 2026 adopted by these countries at the end of 2021.
“Universal accessibility guarantees the ability to navigate using one’s language in a way that respects one’s interests, origin, culture”, explained in videoconference last Monday Louis Houle, of PointQuébec. “It opens the door to all the languages of the world, including in Canada the languages of the First Nations — Abenaki, Atikamekw, Innu, Algonquin and Wendat. »
There are also some more down-to-earth benefits for governments, Houle adds. Directly accessible services, such as Health. Quebec. “There is a simple way for the government to get closer to citizens and create a bond of trust based on direct addresses,” says Louis Houle.
If only everything were so simple… Because at present, even if it is possible to have an accented website in Quebec, it is almost impossible to have an accented email address. “We are at the stage of ensuring the security and stability of these addresses, but it is a work in progress », sums up the one whose language probably forked when he used a popular expression for which even the Office québécois de la langue française does not provide a simple equivalence.
It is certainly a work whose evolution is constant… and probably crucial for the health of languages threatened by the ubiquitous English.