Sidebar: ? Automatic Translation The U.S.-based Internet evolved as an all-English-language vehicle, which convinced non-English countries that it would be used as a tool to seal America's economic and linguistic hegemony.

But that has not come to pass.

As the Web dominates the Internet, with its facile software and multimedia presentation, English has started to lose its grip as the default language. This trend owes much to efforts by the French, Quebecois, Japanese, and other nervous governments, to preserve their national languages, but also, perhaps more importantly, to sheer market forces.

Non-U.S. Internet users will outnumber American Netizens by the end of 1998, and the fastest growing markets are China and India, according to the Irish Internet research group Emarketer [see chart]. Software companies and search engines have developed popular Web-browsing products in languages such as French, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese and Scandinavian.

To be sure, the Web is still very much an Anglo-Saxon world. More than half of the world's users -- an estimated 62 million -- are American. About 82% of all Web sites are in English, and 90% of e-mail is typed in English, according to the Internet Society, an American nonprofit organization that develops and maintains Internet standards.

The early dominance of the U.S. and the English language on the Net sparked much nervous hand-wringing around the world, especially in French-speaking countries.

In January 1997, two associations for the protection of French language sued the Georgia Institute of Technology for publishing the Web site of its Eastern France mini-campus in English. They cited a controversial 1994 French law that requires all advertisements to either be in French or to have French subtitles. The law was introduced by former Gaullist culture minister Jacques Toubon, who once described the dominance of English as 'a new form of colonialism.'

The suit, considered to be the first attempt in any country to force translation of Web sites, was rejected by a Paris court, which argued that the American university hadn't broken the law. The Web site was considered an information structure, aimed at English-speaking students and was by no means an advertising tool, the court ruled.

In Quebec, the troubled French-speaking Canadian province famous for its strict language laws, the Internet is governed by the same rules as catalogs, brochures, flyers, faxes and any kind of commercial communication -- French must come first. English and other tongues are allowed, but they must be less prominent, according to the Quebec government's Office de la Langue Francaise.

Jean-Claude Gu?don, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal who has written a series of articles about language usage on the Internet, argues that while government tactics to protect national languages differ, bilingualism is most often used. 'If not trilingualism,' he said. 'Some German sites, for example, as well as Quebecois, cheerfully add Spanish in many governmental sites.'

Japanese academics have also regularly warned against embracing American Netiquette, saying that it threatens to eventually erode Japanese culture and traditions. Unlike France, Japan has no large anti-English movement, but the language's kanji characters do not lend themselves to overseas e-mail. The government is now studying how to use Japanese on the Net, seeking cooperation from other Asian nations with languages that do not use the Roman alphabet.

For France, the fundamentalist language question distracts from the real issue of the country's reluctant embrace of the Internet and its status as a technology-allergic loser. Last year, France had fewer than four Internet-connected computers per 1,000 residents -- half the rate of Germany, one-third the rate of Great Britain and one-tenth of the U.S. Only 15% of French households have computers.

The fault for this delay may not lie so much in the language debate as with the Minitel, an innovative French-only service that was the world's first version of e-commerce when it was introduced in 1982. [See related story.] An estimated 7 million people have Minitel terminals in their homes and offices, using it to book train tickets, check bank accounts and join chat rooms -- mostly erotic ones.

But as French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has delicately admitted, the Minitel is technologically limited, expensive and nearly impossible to export. The government is no longer stubbornly trying to protect its pride and joy against the cheaper and more useful Internet, which now claims 1 million users in France -- double the number from last year. Further, Jospin announced last year that French schools were on their way to becoming wired and multimedia production and electronic commerce would be officially encouraged.

As European, Asian and South American online usage increases in rates that dwarf American use, non-English content is finally growing in measurable numbers. The World Watch Institute, a nonprofit public policy group, projects that the number of users in China and India will multiply 15 times over to reach 5.5 million by 2000.

And U.S. search engine companies are betting that multilingual Internet growth will revolutionize the way commerce, news and research will be presented on the Web.

In Japan, Yahoo!, which requires the use of a sophisticated Web browser to view Japanese characters properly, is known to be widely responsible for a sudden surge in the number of Internet users.

This year, Netscape Communications along with Star Media Network created a free Internet guide in Spanish and Portuguese aimed at Latin America.

Alta Vista, the most popular search engine in Europe, is now in fierce competition with Swedish-based EuroSeek, which claims that 80% of its 10 million indexed sites are European. On a continent where more than 100 languages and dialects are spoken, the company provides resources in such obscure languages as Breton, Catalan and Welsh, among others.

In fact, the time zone-hopping qualities of the Internet may increase the usage of selected languages, Gu?don said, channeling the communication of what he calls 'synthetic diasporas.' Now second-generation Hungarians in Canada can read Hungarian newspapers every day on the Web, and immigrants in New York City can create Web sites in their native languages.

'The Internet allows the reinforcement of the daily use of languages which are normally limited to a certain territory on the globe,' Gu?don said. '[It] doesn't represent a threat of homogenization like television does.'