Linguistic inclusion?

We have heard all kinds of things in this new world, but this was a new one – linguistic inclusion.

Yes, we in India are just about understanding the true meaning of inclusion and we now have further intricate forms of inclusion – linguistic inclusions. And its latest finding is that the internet has foregone a huge ‘inclusion’ of 17 million people because of the dominance of English language.  They say that the internet caters mainly to English speakers only as majority of the websites are in English and they say that even the way people navigate to websites is set up to exclude non-English language users.

The problem lay within the domains inself – the .coms , .or.orgs. Later this grew to many more with internet users with their own country domain names. Thus domain names were no longer restricted to just 3 words. And this is where the problem of plenty began. As more and more domain names got registered, many of these were not recognized by major systems on the web that had been programmed to accept three-letter domains. A report on the same on CNN said that this mattered a lot because the internet’s growth depends on users from developing countries, and they want to use their own languages online.

It might sound very technical and geeky to most of us but the bottomline is that dominance of English has kept off many off the internet. Maybe its time to take English to them?