ABSTRACT
The internet was first developed in English in the United States. A major debate within the literature of multilingualism online in the 1990s was whether the spread of the internet would bring about new relations between English and other languages of the world. Concerns were also expressed as to whether English would “rule” the internet. This partly grew out of intense scholarly interest in the topic of language and globalization. Academic responses to this inquiry were twofold: Some believed that the internet encouraged the growth of English, while others argued that the spread of a global network would give rise to linguistic diversity. The primary aim of this chapter is to map out the linguascape of the internet (Ivković and Lotherington, 2009; Thorne and Ivković, 2015) and to provide an overview of the relationship between English and other languages on the web.
