The Tower of Babel is a Biblical explanation of why we all speak different languages. The story goes that humans tried to build a tower so tall they could reach the Heavens. God, unimpressed with their attempts, spread humans across the world, giving each tribe its own language so they couldn’t communicate again.
Snap back to modern reality: we’ve taken another shot at building an online Babel to reach the digital heavens, with English as the web’s lingua franca. Billions of people use the internet every day, the majority from developing countries. This is why in 2020, over half of the web will for the first time be written in languages that are not English.
This change is being driven by one of the key demands from the online world: people want to be entertained. Netflix and YouTube know this too – it’s why we’re seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of localised content. Whether you’ve made a Swahili soap opera or a documentary in Hindi, it's now possible to reach an audience of hundreds of millions online.
Next year, the internet will become increasingly localised in this way, with content in dozens of different languages. And this will have consequences. English may eventually lose its position as the internet’s core language, replaced perhaps by Spanish or Mandarin Chinese. By then, of course, it may not be necessary to speak another language to understand it as online translation leaps forward.
Daniel Becerra is the founder of BuffaloGrid
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
