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Perhaps it has already, especially in these politically and economically tight times. Even the left appears rightist, and those who were once proponents of governments spending on social programs now admit the necessity of restraint. This is possibly where multiculturalism is most threatened. Diversity is expensive. ISEA could have chosen to hire interpreters for at least one other language during the conference, but it would not have had the money. Professional translators can make up $.25 per word. In the age of cost-cutting and downsizing, commonality is key. The potential richness of diversity becomes nothing more than an annoying exercise in duplication which finance people are all too ready to "amend". Wouldn't everything be so much cheaper if everyone just spoke the same language? Hey, why not English! It's a Mega-language!
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Here in Canada, one cannot engage in a conversation about language without also bringing into it socioeconomic and political factors. The French see their language dying amidst an English culture and are fighting tooth and nail to preserve it. Most of us in English Canada now recognize the valuable contribution that the French make to our nation, and while we support the efforts of our French cousins to preserve their lives and histories within a common Canadian framework, there is also this underlying cautious air of the inevitability that they will either separate to preserve their language, or failing that, continue to be swallowed up in the English nation. The irony, of course, is that separation is no guarantee against that inevitability in the first place.
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Nor is it for the rest of the world. The so-called "free access to information" that the Global Village promises via the Internet is only truly free to those who can speak its language. The vast majority of content on the net is in English, and there is little or no effort on the part of those who create its content to make available or proactively share that information to non-English sites (including, admittedly, CyberStage).
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Perhaps we simply don't have the time. Or the money. Perhaps we're too busy trying to figure out how to stay alive economically ourselves, that the importance of the richness of our collective tapestry has slipped from our personal -- and more widely, public -- agenda. And while those of us in the privileged world may applaud the efforts of our sister nations to develop Internet content which expresses their own ideas and culture in their own language, what are the rest of us doing to support it? The answer to that question will mark the difference between whether the net truly becomes the Global Village, or simply the greatest colonizer of all time.
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