Prologue and Antecedents

This study follows on from work carried out by FUNREDES between 1995 and 1998¹ on the presence of latin languages and cultures on the Web. This study concentrates on languages. The basic methodological principle behind the previous version has been kept. It is concerned with measuring, in defined spaces on the Internet², the number of mentions or occurences of 57 predefined words, each communicating a concept which has an equivalent meaning or implication in the studied languages (English, French, Italian, Portugese, Romanian and Spanish), then analysing and comparing the results to deduce, using statistical analysis, the percentile value of each one. The first steps of extending the study to include German have been taken (with the intention of eventually including other languages).

The environment of search engines has changed a lot since the previous study, which lead to an analysis of the implication of changes on our methodology and has brought about perceptible improvements to previous works.

Use of many search engines after careful selection, with the aim of gaining the most accurate results.
Automated tallying and calculations by software having an interfacing role between a database of the terms being counted and the search engines. This will allow the future publication of results at regular intervals and will mean that 'real-time' observations can be made.
Automatic systematic processing of inter-linguistic homographies, strengthening the methodology.

Additionally, some errors which cropped up in some of the sample have been corrected³. Moreover, the extending of the study to include German has been initiated, without changing the current research method of occurences thereby collecting results markedly less precise than those of the other languages⁴.

References will be made in the earlier stages of this study. To help the reader, a synthesis of procedures and previous results, with associated Internet links, allowing access to relevant documents is given in Appendix 1.

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With the support of the Agence de la francophonie ('Francophone Agency') for the fourth edition and in collaboration with Union Latine as from the third edition.
In this edition, only pages on the Web have been included and not Usenet.
These were minor errors which did not cause too much disparity in the published results of the last study.
The construction of German words (an agglutinate language where there is a tendance for two or more words to be compacted into one) means that the research method applied to the other languages gives results which do not demonstrate linguistic reality. The results presented here, with weighted corrections, are still approximate. The problems posed to the adoption of our methodology vis German are detailed in Chapter 4.2.1.