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THE PLACE OF LATIN LANGUAGES AND
CULTURES ON THE INTERNET
1. Prologue and previous research
This study on the presence of languages and cultures on the
Internet, is following works conduced by Funredes between 1995 and 1998 on the topic of
the place of French (and Spanish) on the Web. The basic methodological principle has been
preserved. It consists in measuring and analyzing the appearance of terms and personal
names in the studied languages inside certain domains of the Internet information
resources. Improvements have been added in relation to the previous works.
For the whole study:
- Systematic search of related works (here only for the linguistic part).
- Extension to all the Latin languages: Spanish, French,
Italian, Portuguese and Rumanian, with a version of the present document in each one of
these languages, as well as in English.
For the linguistic part:
- Basic linguistic methodology reinforced by the creation of a sample of terms presenting all the guarantees to
give reliable results.
- Determination of reliable intervals.
- Extension of the research area to the newsgroups (Usenet).
- Weighting of the results according to the world-wide presence
of each studied languages.
For the cultural part:
- Comparison with the results of previous studies and analysis
of trends.
- Systematization of all theLatin languages cultures: Spanish,
French, Italian, Portuguese and Rumanian.
- Application of the basic methodology, improved by a more
consistent classification and a more varied sample of personal names.
- Analysis of the apparition of certain personal names (first
per language, followed by detailed analysis examining the language of reference of the
individual).
The study will be soon published
References will be done to the previous stages
this research. In order to help the reader, a synthesis of the previous steps and results,
with the associated Internet links, can be accessed in Appendix 1.
| N.B. : the reader will notice that, all along the present
document, the term "from the United States (both masculine and feminine )" has
been used instead the most common "american (both masculine and feminine)". The
authors took this choice in order to avoid every ambiguity or extrapolation. Indeed, if
the expression "American culture" or "north - American culture" is
usually understood like "culture of the United States of America", its sense
seemes too broad as well as inaccurate for a good understanding of this study
("American" or "north - American" can effectively be applied to Canada
or Mexico). |
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