[MUD-Dev] Internationalisation: The effect of Tongues in virtual societes

[Ghovs]

Peter \"Pietro\" Rossmann wrote, among other things:

>  but now, the world opens more once again. we've got virtual
>  worlds.  everybody likes it, everybody wants to have it. even the
>  "rest" of the world that is non-english speaking. So they get
>  in. and then, evem that the player can generally communicate in
>  english, he will be laid off. because all this games are built
>  around socializing, in which he cannot take a part. he has never
>  met words like grinding, threadmilling [if he don't goes to gym]
>  and such.  So, i am wondering - would the VW (virtual worlds, not
>  volkswagen) help to unite us by usage of english? Or will it be
>  dedicated only to those speeking (writing) english?

>From my personal experience, when visiting specifically non-english
MUD/MMORPG environments, there will be a LOT more anglicisms (that
is, evil infestations of english language into the other) in
people's speech than in an ordinary, every-day language purist
society.

As such, they seem to function as a sort of preparation, perhaps
even a learning space for speaking english all the time. At least
for the people who want that. There are monolingual people in such
places as well, and they're quite happy to stay there.

Such places are fragile in a way, since they have no adequate means
to enforce the specific language, thus pushing people with their
back against the wall in some cases, when a horde of english
speakers springs up overnight.

It has always been so that english was the main language on the
internet, as evidenced by such cultural expressions as spam, spam,
spam, spam and spam (oh, and banner ads). Most commercial efforts on
the web are either by companies with a very local product (in a
local language), or by companies with a heavily international
orientation (english).

Despite my fairly large knowledge of human languages, I will always
assume that english is my best bet, with german and french trailing
behind that. The others are more like wildcards, really. Knowing
english is access to a great deal of information on the web, much
less so for any other language. It is for me, however, most
importantly access to the most people.

There are by now some (like Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot) who
support different languages, but you will notice that they tend to
center around german and french as 'other language', since those
seem to be the largest non-english preferred languages among MMORPG
players.

And, sadly, there seem to always be bits and pieces which do not get
translated. So, for instance, a Korean player of Everquest will
still see a rather non-intuitive labelling of buttons in-game,
unless she happens to know enough english to get along.

As it is, you are practically forced to know english to participate
in a large on-line community which reaches beyond your national
borders. Wether that is a unifying factor, that's fodder for
sociologists, but it does definitely help people understand others
who are half a world away. (I said 'understand', not 'like')

rgds,
ghovs
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