Global Linguistic Diversity for the Internet

Аннотация

The Internet has made written communication more global, but financial support is still needed to make Internet-based written communication more accessible to everyone. The development and adoption of the international character-encoding standard known as Unicode in computer software and fonts makes it possible to send and receive—and read—text electronically for hundreds of languages, all in their original scripts. Chinese, Greek, German, and Arabic can now be included in Web pages and email without the text getting garbled or marred with square boxes as placeholders. This multilingual capability frees users from ASCII’s limited repertoire. Communicating with people in their own language and script also gives the world’s diverse populations an electronic presence in the global information economy.