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CATALAN AND INTERNET By Miquel Strubell i Trueta Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana In 2005 Jordi Mas published a report on the presence on the Internet of the top 34 languages, according to Google. Naturally, English took first place, with 9•4 billion pages, over 45 times more than the runner-up, French (with 202 million pages). Ahead of Slovene, Slovakian and the three Baltic languages, among others, came Catalan, which took 26th place. In the previous two years it had been overtaken by Greek, Indonesian, Croatian and Romanian (though earlier counts had been undertaken using www.alltheweb.com, which is built on different technology). In terms of pages per speaker, Catalan was 19th, immediately ahead of Hungarian, Greek, Polish, Bulgarian and Spanish, among others. The figures strongly that the Catalan-speaking world was quite quick to realise the enormous potential that the world wide web offered. Infopista, an early electronic newspaper, became www.vilaweb.cat in 1996, and has never looked back. An Internet-based university, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, also began to offer its first degree courses – in Catalan – in 1995. The figures given above do not mean to say that all websites of bodies based in the Catalan-speaking lands have their website in Catalan. An organisation set up by Catalan webmasters, WICCAC.CAT, has monitored this development over the years, since 2002, thanks to its Barometer of the Use of Catalan on the Internet. In that time the proportion of websites in Catalan (or with a Catalan version) has risen from 40•7% to 59•0% (in February 2010). WICCAC has tracked down 78 websites in Catalan, of local authorities, organisations, blogs and companies based in French Catalonia. By sectors, WICCAC highlights areas in which the use of Catalan is least prevalent (chiefly, industrial and commercial websites, such as electrical appliances and photography – 7% in Catalan -; motor cars and motor bikes – likewise 7%) or most prevalent (such as universities – 100% -; Theatre and Dancing – 97%; Fairs and Shows – 89%-; and Wines – 88%). The Catalan-speaking community, which has over 6 million first language speakers, and a further 3 million who speak it as a second language, is unique in having a top level domain (TLD) of its own, assigned by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. “.CAT” falls between the politically-defined TLDs such as .UK, .FR or .ES, on the one hand, and thematically defined domains such as .ORG, .TV or .COM. “A short history of the Catalan campaign to win the .cat Internet domain, with implications for other minority languages”, by Australian Peter Gerrand, makes interesting reading. The freedom that is a feature of the Internet also helps to explain why Catalans have taken to the Internet with such enthusiasm. Moreover, groups of volunteers have made it possible to download Catalan versions of a whole range of popular computer programmes, including Open Office, Firefox and WinRAR (through Softcatalà), or the popular TV series “Lost” with Catalan subtitles. |
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