Multilingualism in a global Web ·
Questo è il mio contributo al tema mensile dell’IndieWeb Carnival, suggerito da Riccardo Cazzin alias ZinRicky: “multilinguismo in un Web globale”.
Techies can skip the autobiography and just read the nerd stuff at the bottom of the article. Přeju vám příjemné čtení. Au revoir!
I was born in a bilingual family: between themselves, and in their home village, my parents speak Piedmontese; with me, and with strangers, they always speak Italian. At best I am a passive listener of our regional language, which is unlikely to survive past my generation.
When I attended primary school, no foreign languages were part of the curriculum. In third grade I had the lucky chance to be signed up for an optional English course, where the teacher was a cousin of my father’s. I learnt some basics, and at the end of that I remember performing in some kind of play in front of an audience.
When they enrolled me to middle school, citing that one course, my parents demanded that I joined a form with English, not useless French, as the second language. The teacher who took their request happened to be the English teacher of that school, my dearest of all.
Then I attended high school in the late ‘90s, which meant Cool Britannia, MTV, and the World Wide Web.
At the very end of 1999, on my 17th birthday, I published my first vanity website: Massimiliano sul Web.
Fast-forward twenty-five years: after a brief stint in Scotland, I am now an expat an economic migrant in the Czech Republic, where I work for an American company. I wake up and the thoughts in my head are mostly in Italian. I take the šalina surrounded by people talking in Czech. In the office I speak English with the locals, and in calls also with Malaysians, Indians, Europeans of all sorts, Brits, Mexicans, and Americans of all accents. I used to deal with French customers, mixing up their language I eventually learnt in high school with my familiar Piedmontese. Working in teams with lovely colleagues I have absorsed some Slovak and some Spanish, which in recent travels I pretended to understand.
I am quite proud of my language-juggling skills.
Since that first vanity website I have been a natural-born blogger, although intermittently.
In the two previous private “expat blogs” I kept, Cicely, Scotland and Moravian Like You, both on Blogspot, I wrote in Italian because Italian was my only readership: my parents, my friends, other people I had left behind. When I felt again the urge to have a public digital identity, back to my own domain, and I opened the Virtualia? you are now reading, it came natural to employ all the languages I know, all at once.
I tend to use each language based on the subject I am treating and on the ideal readership I am addressing. These pages are first and foremost a diary, and Italian is my mother tongue, therefore most content is in Italian. Commentary on entertainment media and on current events may be either in Italian or in English. This article is written for a global audience, that is why I am writing it all in English. The ongoing series about my recent travel to Kazakhstan is in Italian, with the exception of the open letter I wrote to some people I got to know there; the series about my old trip to Jerusalem is in English, because it has been a talking point with international friends I have here. Other random articles are in Czech or in French, as an exercise or to attract someone’s attention. Sometimes I quote words in languages other than the four I speak. Sometimes I employ different languages in the same paragraph or even in the same sentence, purely as means of personal expression.
So what is the language attribute of my Virtualia?
<html lang="mul">Actually it was eo, the ISO 639-1 code for Esperanto, until a few minutes ago, as a joke because I just couldn’t choose which primary language to declare. it for Italian would cover most content, as I wrote above, but not everything. mul comes from ISO 639-2 and denotes instead that multiple languages are used, which sounds appropriate. Yet I assume that applying the mul code to documents has the same practical effect in browsers and in screen readers as not applying any.
Should I care? Is language still necessary information to provide? The dominant search engine uses algorithms to categorise documents based on their actual content. I don’t rely on the browsers’ features to generate the punctuation (e.g. hyphens and quotation marks) of my own text. I admit ignorance about screen readers, and I wonder to what extent they can adapt to different languages on the fly.
Also I am aware that the language attribute cascades, that I could apply a different one to any HTML element, and that I could wrap words in span tags where needed; but I have been typing all these bytes by hand, can you imagine the effort?
I can imagine the effort. One day I started to apply language attributes to my Virtualia? retroactively, then I went out and touched grass.
