Anglophone

The word “anglophone“ can be used to refer to the English speaking world community. For example, if you wanted to refer to the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada as a set of nations where English is predominantly spoken then you might find the word “anglophone“ useful. I suspect this word was coined in response to the word “francophone“, which may have originated with the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). I have never encountered this word before, until I began to seriously study French. Unfortunately, the WikiPedia article on anglophone sheds no light on the origins of the term. I found their article so misleading that I took the unusual step of complaining about it in the talk page. However the Wiktionary entry for anglophone shows an etymology that suggests this word is merely a French adjective. That would explain why I have not seen this word used much in English!

But I find the concept quite useful because the world wide online community has formed around the English language with other communities forming around other languages. In addition to “anglophone“and “francophone“, there are the words “hispanophone” for the Spanish speaking world community and “germanophone” for the German speaking world community. However, you probably won’t find those terms used in German or Spanish language textbooks.

Social networking has broken down geographic and national barriers but it cannot cross language barriers. For example, the YouTube community brought together an international community of vloggers. For the first time in history, average people could easily interact with people in other countries from the comfort of their homes, i.e. without travel. But the participation was limited to Americans, Canadians, Brits, and Australians plus a few people from other countries who could speak fluent English. So while some people may have celebrated the international community that formed there, it actually excluded a large part of the world.

The text forums on the Internet also increase one’s exposure to the world community but the language everyone uses is English. There may be many forums in other languages but without the same mix of nationalities. While English is the lingua franca for the Internet, I come across mentions that web sites in French, German, and Chinese also account for a large portion of online content. See Internet World Users By Language This content is readily accessible and you can explore it using translation software and plugins but that can be very tedious and imperfect. As video becomes more popular as the media format for online content, language barriers will reassert themselves. YouTube offers to translate videos made in another language but I think that only applies to the video tags and description. It is possible to provide captions to your video in other languages but that is far too much trouble for anyone to use.

I’ve discovered that you can explore another culture in depth, even a culture based on another language, using the Internet. This has become one of the most fascinating uses of my online time. But it does require a slight knowledge of the target language to effectively navigate web sites written in another language. Unfortunately there aren’t any specialized vocabulary lists for Internet terms. I’ve had to create my own vocabulary list of  French Internet phrases like “laisser des commentaires“ which means “leave comments“. I did find a web page with tips on how to decipher French texting, Les Textos française.

There are several other factors in my gradual transformation into an intrepid cultural explorer. I have cancelled my cable television and newspaper subscriptions so the mass media is no longer capable of defining the scope of my attention. My participation in the YouTube community greatly increased my awareness of other cultures in their contemporary manifestation. Rather than viewing this as a personal quirk of mine, you should realize that this is the direction the country is going in as newspapers fold for lack of advertising and the public increasingly gets its information online without the usual content restrictions.