It is a shame that Chinese has not become the language of the web (…yet!). English and Chinese adopt fundamentally different approaches to representing language and meaning, and it’s interesting to think how the web and information systems might change if Chinese continues to progress towards linguistic ascendancy.

Written Chinese is a semantic language, conveying meaning through ideographic characters. In contrast, written English is based on a phonetic alphabet that represents the English pronunciation of a word (from which an English speaker can then derive meaning). A reader must both know the accepted pronunciation rules (and the myriad exceptions to them) and understand spoken English to find meaning in the written language.

On the other hand, an English speaker can understand Chinese characters without ever learning spoken Chinese. This is the case for speakers of the various Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese and several others), who use almost exactly the same written language to communicate in spoken language that can be incomprehensibly different.

This system of divorcing pronunciation from meaning offers many advantages when applied to web content. A good analogy is the relationship between HTML and CSS, which seeks to disentangle content (HTML) from the information that describes its appearance (CSS).

For example, a web-page encoded in Chinese characters could be understood by anyone who understands the characters, but pronounced in Mandarin, Cantonese, and theoretically in English, Dutch or French. (Although differences in syntax are problematic it would be possible to develop systems to re-order sentence structure according to the rules of the user’s native language).

Chinese has the most native speakers of any language on Earth, and Chinese speakers are engaging with the internet at a rate that will soon see them become the largest group of users in the digital domain. It will be interesting to see how their presence will shape the information systems of the future.