In the popular mind, the Internet is the realization of the global village, where the flow

of information and ideas is unimpeded by distance or national barriers. Much has been written (1) the technology and the benefits that this system of unregulated information exchange will bring. But (2) has been very little discussion about the languages—human, not computer languages (3) are being used on the Internet.

Central (4) the ideology of the emerging Internet community is the freedom of the individual users to express (5) as they like. Nevertheless, (6) recently, it has been very difficult to communicate through the Internet in any language (7) could not be expressed in the standard English alphabet as defined (8) the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).

English is already the premier (9) of science and technology worldwide. The peculiar restriction of (10) able to communicate with only the limited ASCII character set has worked to further encourage the (11) English, especially by those (12) native language is not normally expressed in some version of (13) Roman alphabet.

In fact, it seems to be typical that (14) accessing a network in a non-English speaking country (15) is often presented with a choice of the local language(s) or English. Many of the national networks that have now linked (16) to the Internet are used (17) scientific and technical communication, (18) a rapidly growing portion of the Internet's community are non-professional people.

Familiarity with English may be assumed (19) a linguist or a physicist, but growing (20) of users with no English language skills are joining the net in (21) of the dominance of English in message forums and mail lists. Messages (22) the Usenet newsgroups are overwhelmingly (23) in English, and the bulk of the moderated mailing lists (including (24) Linguist Discussion List, and international E-mail discussion list for linguists) are conducted in (25) .

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