“Choose your language!” Categorisation and control in cyberspace.

SOCIOLINGUISTICA 27/2013

Helen Kelly-Holmes

“Choose your language!” Categorisation and control in cyberspace

"Wählen Sie Ihre Sprache!" Kategorisierung und Herrschaft im Cyberspace

Die Mehrsprachigkeit hat sich zu einem häufig vorkommenden Tropus von Marken

entwickelt, die durch dot.com und Gateway-Websites eine globale Präsenz demonstrieren

wollen. Mehr und mehr Unternehmen, Gruppen und Medien-Organisationen stellen eine

wachsende Anzahl von Sprachen zur Wahl, um auf der einen Seite sich als global zu

qualifizieren und auf der anderen Seite Dienste in der “eigenen” Sprache des Kunden

anzubieten. Technologische Entwicklungen bedeuten nun, dass mehrsprachige Dienst-

leistungen nicht nur möglich sind, sondern auch in den neuen Medien erwartet werden.

Wie Heller (2008: 505) uns sagt, „die Grenzen der Nutzbarkeit von festen soziologischen

oder linguistischen Variablen oder von festen Entsprechungen zwischen Sprache

(verstanden als ein ganzes, beschränktes System), individueller sozialer Stellung innerhalb

stabiler Gemeinschaften und Grenzen von Gemeinschaften“ werden zunehmend von

Forschern anerkannt. Dennoch informiert weiterhin eine Beschäftigung mit „Homogenität

und territorialer Verankerung“ (Heller 2008: 207) die mehrsprachige Dienstleistung im

„grenzenlosen“ Cyberspace. Die Verhängung von Ordnung in einer mehrsprachigen Welt

durch das Ausrichten auf bestimmte Sprachen mit festen geografischen Gebieten geht

weiter. Dieses Phänomen steht im Gegensatz zu ungeregelten Praktiken auf Web 2.0,

welche Hybridität und Heteroglossie reflektieren. Diese stehen auch im Gegensatz zu

festen Kategorisierungen und zu Versuchen, sprachliches Verhalten zu regulieren (vgl.

Androutsopoulos 2011).

In diesem Artikel stütze ich mich auf frühere eigene Arbeiten (Kelly-Holmes 2006), um

die Dienstleistung mit und Verwaltung von Sprachen auf einer Reihe von globalen

Gateway-Websites zu untersuchen und zu sehen, wie solche Praktiken herrschende

Sprachideologien verstärken und/oder herausfordern. Diese Ideologien versuchen, eine

saubere Trennung der Sprachen und ihrer Sprecher in Form von diskreten Paarungen

herzustellen (Heller 2008: 510f.).

<<Choisissez votre langue!>> Catégorisation et contrôle dans l’espace cyber

Le multilinguisme est devenu un trope commun des marques qui projettent leur présence

mondiale par le biais de sites point.com et de sites passerelle. De plus en plus

d’entreprises, de groupes et d’organisations médiatiques proposent un nombre croissant

d'options de langue pour faire preuve de leur bonne volonté, d'une part, et pour fournir des

services dans la ‘propre’ langue du client, d'autre part. Il résulte des développements

http://dot.com/

134 Helen Kelly-Holmes


technologiques récents que la disposition multilingue n'est pas seulement possible mais

également considérée comme allant de soi par les lecteurs de nouveaux média. Comme le

démontre Heller (2008 :505) les scientifiques reconnaissent de plus en plus << les limites

d’utilité des variables sociologiques ou linguistiques fixes ou des correspondances figées

entre langue (conçue comme système), l’individu dans sa communauté et les frontières de

cette communauté>>. Néanmoins le respect de <<l’homogénéité et de l’intégrité du

territoire national >> (Heller 2008 :207) perdure et conditionne l’offre multilingue dans

l’espace cyber. On cherche toujours la congruence de langue standard avec un territoire

délimité géographiquement et politiquement. - pour imposer de l’ordre sur un monde

multilingue Ce phénomène se différencie nettement des pratiques non réglementées sur le

Web 2.0, qui reflètent l'hybridité et hétéroglossie et contrarient toute catégorisation fixe et

tout essai de réglementer le comportement langagier (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011).

Dans cet article je me base sur mes recherches antérieures pour explorer l’offre

linguistique et l’aménagement d’un nombre de sites portail d’entreprises multinationales.

Je tente d’évaluer comment leurs pratiques renforcent l’idéologie dominante linguistique -

qui veut <<la séparation nette des langues et locuteurs et la congruence évidente de ceux-

ci>> (Heller 2008: 510-511).

***

1. Introduction

A central concern of contemporary corporations and institutions that aspire to act globally

is how to manage multilingualism. Global companies, institutions, media outlets and non-

governmental organisations are, in a sense, “damned if they do” and “damned if they

don't” in relation to multilingual provision on the Web. On the one hand, if they opt for

English, they take a chance that their blanket decision will be seen as a vote in favour of

the language that is currently fulfilling the role of global lingua franca. On the other hand,

if they opt for providing many language options, they face the impossible task of trying to

satisfy all possible consumer demands in relation to language. Both policies risk excluding

someone. As Wee (2010: 421) points out, “it is simply not possible for any institution to

be completely neutral in the sense of not favouring any particular language, and by

extension, the speakers of that language”. Linguistic provision involves some choice and

that choice will inevitably include some and exclude more. In addition, global

communication on the Web has evolved in the last decade, due to technological and

economic factors, from a situation of English plus some “supercentral” (de Swaan 2001)

languages to a situation where a multilingual display in the form of multiple language

options in their relevant alphabets has become not just an index of global presence and

authority, but also an expectation of a movement, corporation or institution that claims the

attribute of globality, “competing with everyone from everywhere for everything” as

Sirkin, Hemerling and Bhattacharya (2008) put it. A further interesting development is

that the World Wide Web, as it has gained greater global reach and become more

genuinely “worldwide” in terms of spatial, temporal and linguistic reach, has, it can be

argued, become more “bordered” in terms of categorising and confining individuals to

national boundaries and national language groupings, as we shall see in this article (cf.

“Choose your language!” Categorisation and control in cyberspace 135


also Kelly-Holmes 2006). This article explores three key trends in terms of how global

multilingualism is managed on the Web, namely “neutral English”, boundary-making and

multilingual display. I begin by looking briefly at the issue of categorisation, or

“segmentation” in marketing terms, multilingualism and the Web before going on to

examine these trends using websites that exemplify them.

2. Segmentation, multilingualism and the Web

Segmentation involves dividing up global markets and consumers in order to create

smaller markets that are loyal to a differentiated product or brand. The type of

segmentation can be based on any number of factors or combination of these factors, e.g.

age, gender, lifestyle, education and language. In global marketing on the Web, the

primary segmentation is on the basis of a perceived congruence between geographical

location and language, through the provision of country sites on the basis of top level

domains (e.g. McDonalds.de in German for Germany, McDonalds.fr in French for

France). Segmentation is analogous to categorisation in that it makes the market

manageable for the marketer. It enables people to be categorised into groups and these

groups can be targeted with differentiated products, brands, messages etc. through

marketing. Linguistic segmentation involves dividing up the market into speakers of

different languages and creating glocalised marketing and advertising materials for these

language groups. In practical terms, linguistic segmentation allows for communication

with particular groups.

However, this practical concern may also have a symbolic input into the differentiated

product or brand. For example, the need to speak the customer’s language may not simply

be a marketing necessity, but may also represent the differentiation of a product or brand

as being “in touch with” and concerned about (certain) customers (in certain locations).

Language, like lifestyle, can be an attractive differentiation and segmentation strategy,

especially, though not exclusively, where speakers of a particular language are

economically powerful, have activated language rights and are protected by explicit

language policies. For instance, the provision by a global brand of advertising and product

information in a small central or peripheral language (in de Swaan 2001 terms) may be

motivated less by a desire to communicate, since speakers of peripheral languages tend by

definition to be multilingual, and more by an aim to be seen as sympathetic to speakers, to

support diversity or simply to stand out as being different from other (dominant national)

brands. For example, while there is widespread knowledge of English in Europe, speakers

of “small” central languages such as Finnish and Norwegian tend to get linguistically

localised provision of content on the Web; and the provision of content in European

regional and minority languages such as Irish, Welsh and Catalan can be seen as the

reflection of an appeal to consumer identity rather than the need to communicate content

that would not otherwise be understood (cf. Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson 2006).

Segmentation in contemporary marketing on the Web generally involves what

Shohamy (2006) terms a “fixed” and “narrow” encoding of language for the purposes of

“categorising group memberships, identities, hierarchies and a variety of other forms of



imposition” (p. 1). Despite initial concerns about the monolingual nature of the early Web

and its dominance first by English and then by ASCII-based characters, technological,

economic and political developments have all combined to create exponential growth in

the multilinguality of the Web. For example, recent statistics show that the number of

users with Chinese IP addresses on the Web is now almost the same as the number of

users from designated English-speaking countries. In fact, from a situation where the Web

was first dominated by English and Roman alphabet and ASCII-based character

languages, five of the top ten languages on the Web are now non-ASCII and non-Roman

(i.e. Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and Korean) (Miniwatts Marketing Group 2012).

Despite the many caveats that must be applied when reading and using such statistics, they

nonetheless do indicate, however imperfectly, growing linguistic diversity. In addition,

many social networking sites and search engines are practising a type of hyper-

differentiation in relation to language, whereby more and more languages are achieving

their own bounded spaces and places of use on the Web. For example, Facebook is

available in Irish, Northern Sámi, and Pirate English, while Google offers its search engine

in Klingon, the “fictional” language of the “Star Trek” science fiction television series and

movie franchise. Furthermore, search engines use information about users geographically

based internet protocol (IP) addresses to tailor user content and trajectories to their

assumed linguistic profile, while online translation tools automatically “warn” users of

content in languages other than the one associated with that geographic location, offering

to localise the “foreign” content for them. Thus, it can be argued that as the Web has

become more multilingual in terms of offering content in an increasing number of

languages, varieties, dialects, sociolects etc., assumptions about language communities are

ironically becoming more bounded, monolingual, and geographically based as a result.

3. “Neutrality”

Unlike “foreign” languages, which tend to have particular associations with certain

geographical locations and particular cultures, English has come to be ideologised in some

quarters as separate to multilingualism and not indexical of any particular country. The

assumption here seems to be that English is not part of multilingualism, instead, its

association is that of neutrality (cf. Cheshire and Moser 1994 in relation to Switzerland;

see Park and Wee 2012 for an extensive discussion of other contexts) or even globality (cf.

Martin 2011, Kelly-Holmes 2005). Wee (2010: 424) highlights that “a language may …

be considered neutral because it represents the language of an Other”, i.e. it is neutral

because it “belongs” to someone else outside of the habitus in question; however, with

English, its supposed neutrality is based on the ideology that it represents the language of

no-one and everyone and that it “…has become a neutral language, a code that can be used

to avoid whatever implications may result from choosing a more identity-laden language”

(Callahan 2005: 284). Thus in complex multilingual situations, neutral status is claimed

for English, even though of course its usage, heritage and legacy are far from neutral (cf.,

for example, Pennycook 1994; Saraceni 2010). Instead of attempting to fulfil the

impossible task of addressing everyone in their own language in for example a country



like India, global corporate websites opt for English, thus enhancing its “neutral” status

and fitness for this purpose, despite evidence that “local content and languages continue to

appeal more to audiences across India” (Martin 2013; cf. Bhatia 2007). Louw (2004)

describes in detail the move to “neutral” English in commercial discourse in South Africa

– a country with an officially multilingual language policy - together with the side-lining

of the negatively connoted language of Afrikaans. As Wee (2010: 422) points out, “the

very idea of language neutrality is deeply ideological in nature, since it is not only an

attempt to treat language itself as a homogenous entity, but also the group of speakers

(typically understood as the ethnic group or the nation) for whom the language represents

some policy-related concern.”

The use of English on global gateway sites for corporations has become a “common-

sense” assumption, even for brands which do not originate in English-speaking countries,

for many of the reasons highlighted above (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2006): English is fetishized

as the “neutral” choice, the “global” choice, the language of technology and modernity. To

not have a global gateway site in English, but to have it instead in the corporation’s home

language or even in another international lingua franca or supercentral (de Swaan 2001)

language such as French or Spanish, without an English option would, nowadays, be

remarkable. The use of English in the gateway site reflects a combination of symbolic and

instrumental factors: on the one hand the desire to exploit the “global” fetish of visual

English, on the other, the desire to exploit the way that English functions as a lingua

franca in the world today. The Nokia site reproduced in Figure 1 exemplifies the “neutral”

English site, designed for lingua franca and global communication purposes. Finnish, the

“home” language of the corporation’s native country and registered business address does

not appear on the gateway page. The instructions to the user to find their local or regional

site, assuming that the search engine has not done this for them already, are in English,

and the names of the regions given (Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and North

America) are in English as are all housekeeping items, legal notices etc. Again, this is not

remarkable; instead, it is, as stated earlier, the “common sense” assumption that the

gateway or “wayfinder” site as it is called here, which sets users on a trajectory towards

the desired and (possibly linguistically) localised information, will be in English. To

choose some other language would be to make a marked and non-neutral choice –

someone else’s language. The fallacy is of course that English is not everyone’s language

and that it has different meanings and associations depending on who - and where - the

user is.



Figure 1: Nokia global gateway

Wee (2010) differentiates between naïve and strategic neutrality, and we can perhaps see

both at work in the use of English for global multilingual management on the Web by

brands such as Nokia. The naivety is driven by the language regime by which English is

positioned as the useful, safe and inoffensive global language, the code that lands planes

safely and has become a global resource detached from its origins and associations with a

particular ethnic polity. Strategic neutrality, Wee argues, involves “a deliberate tactic to

put forward or maintain the status of a language as embodying (intra- or inter-group)

neutrality despite the appreciation and awareness by the claimants that such a status is

highly problematic” (p. 424-425). Interestingly, “neutral English” is also often preferred

for presenting the countries available in each region, rather than giving the country’s name

in (one of) the country’s official language(s) (see Figure 2). Thus, countries are ordered

alphabetically based on English, again reinforcing its “neutral” status and fitness for this

global management purpose. The use of English on the global gateway site thus shows the

interrelationship between communicative and symbolic functioning: English is present in

order to communicate with as many customers as possible; the English display indexes the

brand’s global presence and credibility. The use of English for the gateway site can also be

seen to be making statements about the type of consumer being targeted. It is worth

pointing out that users need a reasonable, if limited, level of proficiency to navigate the

gateway site, and thus possibly excludes those who do not have this proficiency. Only

when the user has made the country choice and is safely within the borders of the relevant



country that linguistic localisation of content takes place, and this aspect will be discussed

in more detail below in terms of boundary-making.

Figure 2: Nokia’s “Europe” region with its list of countries in English.

4. Boundary-making

As outlined above, “neutral” English guides users along a trajectory to content that is

localised to the language which is considered to correspond to the geographical area or

country they have selected either from a list or from a map. Thus, if users click on France

in Nokia’s “Europe” selection (shown in Figure 2), they will automatically be guided to a

localised French language site. Users then have the option to “remember” the country

selection, so that they need never go through the global gateway again. French is of course

not the only language spoken in France, where there are a number of both autochthonous

and allochthonous possibilities, however it is the only one offered for France-based

customers or France-categorised customers. Here we can see an example of strategic

neutrality in Wee’s (2010) terms. French is assumed naively or strategically to be the

“default” language of the France site, since it is the language of the majority, based on an

essentialist reading of language, culture and national group. Essentialism, Bucholtz (2003:

400) reminds us, rests on the ideology that firstly groups can be clearly delimited; and

secondly that “group members are more or less alike”. The categorisation of global

consumers on the Web rest on the “assumption of fixed, uniform and bounded

communities” (Heller 2008: 509).

Heller (2008: 510), writing about polities, argues that the “measurement of population

and then variation and movement in order to facilitate policies [was] aimed at

uniformization and eradication or curtailment of unwanted linguistic or cultural practices

and the people who practised them, or, on the contrary, the development of desired

practices in populations”. Although it may seem extreme, we can see a manifestation of

such an ideology in the categorisation of users on the Web. For example, the essentializing

of language-country links makes it impossible to select an alternative language to French

for a consumer based in France and thus curtails and even eradicates “unwanted”

linguistic practices in the form of autochthonous and allochtonous alternatives,



encouraging instead uniformisation and conformity with the equation of national group

with language. Figure 3 shows a typical example of a localised site, which has been

selected via a “neutral English” global gateway. In this case, it is the Netherlands site for

MacDonalds. The site is in Dutch with the (expected) display and fetishized English (cf.

Kelly-Holmes 2005), which indexes the brand’s global identity as well as playing on and

into the role of English as a global elite language. However, the content of the site is not

available in English, which many Dutch have in their linguistic repertoire, nor is it

available in Turkish or Arabic, two languages widely used in that country.

Figure 3

The essentializing of language-territory links, as practised by the nation state (cf. Wright

2005) and the boundary-making between different territories and consequently different

languages renders monolingualism as normal, and bi- and multilingualism and mixed

practices such as code-switching as problematic and even abnormal (cf. Makoni and

Pennycook 2007) – the latter simply do not exist as an option on such sites. Where



bilingualism does exist on gateway sites, it is respectable and orderly, again demarcated

along explicit territorial lines. We can see an example in figure 4, which shows the home

page of the ebay country site for Belgium, reached, again via a “neutral English” gateway.

French and Dutch exist as ordered, parallel monolingualisms (Heller 2007). We can see on

the Web, which ironically is perceived as being a borderless space, the legacy of historical

work, done largely by the nation state and its institutions (cf. Wright 2005) in terms of a

preoccupation with community and with “who’s in and who’s out” (cf. Heller 2008). This

was something which resulted in a “concentration of work oriented to establishing the

objective existence of languages, culture and nations, and to managing the fuzziness both

of the boundaries among them and of the diversity within” (Heller 2008: 510). It is only

logical then, within the nation-state and bounded-language mind set, that bilingualism,

multilingualism, code-switching, hybridity etc. are problematic and remarkable regardless

of everyday evidence to the contrary. What is perhaps surprising is the (unthinking)

transfer of these ideologies to the “borderless” domain of cyberspace.

Figure 4: ebay’s Belgium site. Users choose either the Dutch or French version and arrive at a linguistically

localised and bounded site in each case.



5. Multilingual display

The final trend prevalent in the management of global multilingualism on the Web which I

would like to discuss is that of multilingual display. While, as highlighted and discussed

above, English is fetishized as a symbol of globality, so too is multilingualism. Both of

these fetishes often co-exist side-by-side in market discourses (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2005),

seemingly in harmony, without appearing to contradict each other. As we saw above,

gateway sites may be in English and then display the language and/or country options

which they offer, often using maps, flags, different languages and alphabets to do so.

These multilingual displays can be seen to enhance the global status of the brand, and

its credibility as a serious global player, already indicated by the use of the “neutral”

lingua franca of English. However, just like the listing of countries in “neutral English”,

discussed above, these multilingual displays, framed within a global English matrix, will

inevitably exclude certain consumers because of the presence of certain languages and

absence of others. Figure 5 shows the multilingual display on the IKEA gateway site, and

straightaway we can see who is in and who is out.

The term “multilingual display” is based on Eastman and Stein’s (1993) concept of

language display, which involves the conscious use of a language or variety or style which

is “foreign” to the user to achieve certain effects. They argue that language display is in

fact most successful where there is limited or even no knowledge of the language being

displayed on the part of the speaker (or listener). Language display thus “represents

symbolic rather than structural or semantic expression” (Eastman and Stein 1993, p. 200),

with the focus on visual form rather than communicative/semantic content; it is not

important what is being said, but in which language it is being said – this is the effect

which the speaker is trying to achieve. Language display, while originally conceived of in

relation to oral data, has increasingly been combined with written data in the study of

visual multilingualism (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2005; cf. Coupland 2012, for instance, for a

recent study of the display of Welsh in the linguistic landscape of Wales). The

multilingual display in global gateway sites on the web functions to signal not only

globality, but also whose language is “in” and whose language is “out”. Language and

country options, as in the IKEA site reproduced in Figure 5, are displayed not in English,

but in the relevant language and alphabet. It is worth noting that, as in the case of IKEA,

this display takes place within a global or “neutral” English frame, creating the blank or

neutral canvas against which multilingualism becomes visible.



Figure 5

A further strategy of multilingual display which indexes globality is to dispense with the

essentialised country-language link, and instead to offer language options to users,

regardless of location. An example of such a strategy is the website of the global lobbying

group Avaaz, reproduced in Figure 6.

Figure 6: avaaz.org



Avaaz offers a multilingual display of a different nature to that of IKEA, in that it offers

alternative languages, not countries. The user simply changes the language of the global

site, rather than moving to a particular country site, and the user can change the language

at any time, language options not being saved. Thus, the categorisation of users on the

Avaaz site offers some escape from the essentialised country-language link that is

otherwise the prevailing model on many global sites – in all likelihood because given the

nature of its mission, it does not have geographical segmentation for market supply etc. in

mind when categorising. This type of multilingual display, not linked to particular

countries, acts as a particularly convincing index of globality and cosmopolitanism and

has the symbolic effect of enhancing the message and ideology of the site as having global

reach and importance. The disentangling of country-language links thus enhances the

“global family” ideoscape (Appadurai 1996) of the organisation and its message, creating

the idea of a global community rather than categorising supporters into country-language

groups. Thus, the multilingual display and non-territorially bounded language options on

the site offer a challenge to “the naturalisation, uniformisation, and objectification of

social groups (Heller 2008: 505), in the sense that the Turkish or Arabic speaker living in

the Netherlands can use Turkish or Arabic, on contrast to the case of the McDonalds'

Netherlands site outlined above. However, the automatic categorising that increasingly

takes place on the Web undermines this somewhat. As stated above, the way in which

search engines use information in IP addresses can often do away with the categorising

function of the gateway site. Hence, the segmenting happens automatically; the user is

escorted to their local site, without even being aware that this sorting is taking place. The

global site is bypassed without ever seeing the language and/or country options that are

available. This lingustic sorting is part of the growing personalisation and

individualisation of the Web. Even with an organisation like Avaaz, the user will be sorted

into a language option based on the geographical location of the IP address and will arrive

at that version of the site, although there is an option to change the language version,

unlike many of the other sites examined. A final point to make in relation to the

multilingual display on avaaz.org is its highlighting of the “damned if you do” element to

attempting multilingual provision on the Web, discussed above in the introduction to this

article. As Wee (2010) argues, there are no neutral language choices, and the multilingual

display on the site inevitably includes the major languages and the large speaker groups

but excludes the lesser used languages and the smaller groups. This sends powerful

messages about linguistic hierarchies that exist on a global scale.

6. Conclusion

What emerges from this brief analysis of the management of multilingualism on the Web

is that there is in fact a large amount of attention given to constructing and maintaining

boundaries and borders on the supposedly “borderless” web. This would support Christine

Hine’s (2000) conclusion that essentialising categories (in terms of gender, age,

nationality) are often reinforced rather than challenged by the Web, and it would appear

that this also applies to language, based on the examples presented here. It is important to



point out that the focus in this paper has been in the monological, institutional Web, which

stands in stark contrast to the dialogic web, where hybridised language practices are

flourishing (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011 for an overview). In terms of the role of English

globally, we can see the homogenising role that it plays in its “neutral” functioning. As

multilingual offerings grow on the Web, technological developments are moving towards

a situation whereby the Web is a space of multiple languages, rather than a space of

multilingualism. Increasing personalisation on the Web, through the use of profiles and

filters, means that individuals can be assigned to a linguistic category based on factors

such as location and certain choices, and end up traversing the “global”, “multilingual”

Web in a monolingual “bubble” (cf. Pariser 2012), in which we are guided to monolingual

content in the language to which we have been assigned. Finally, we need to ask if and

why these developments are important. If we understand the Web as a “social machine”

(Hendler/ Berners-Lee 2009), which is fed by inputs and which “learns” from those inputs,

then we can also understand it as a “sociolinguistic machine” – fuelled by widespread and

“common sense” language ideologies and also a source for refuelling them.

Acknowledgement

*Helen Kelly-Holmes would like to acknowledge the support of the Peripheral

Multilingualism project, funded by the Academy of Finland.

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“Choose your language!” Categorisation and control in cyberspace.

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