In the popular mind, the Internet is the realization of the global village, where the flow of information and ideas is unimpeded by distance or national barriers. Much has been written 1 the technology and the benefits that this system of unregulated information exchange will bring. But 2 has been very little discussion about the languages — human, not computer languages 3 are being used on the Internet. Central 4 the ideology of the emerging Internet community is the freedom of the individual users to express 5 as they like. Nevertheless, 6 recently, it has been very difficult to communicate through the Internet in any language 7 could not be expressed in the standard English alphabet as defined 8 the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). English is already the premier 9of science and technology worldwide. The peculiar restriction of 10 able to communicate with only the limited ASCII character set has worked to further encourage the 11 English, especially by those 12 native language is not normally expressed in some version of 13 Roman alphabet. In fact, it seems to be typical that 14 accessing a network in a non-English speaking country 15 is often presented with a choice of the local language (s) or English. Many of the national networks that have now linked 16 to the Internet are used 17 scientific and technical communication, 18 a rapidly growing portion of the Internet's community are nonprofessional people. Familiarity with English may be assumed 19 a linguist or a physicist, but growing 20 of users with no English language skills are joining the net in spite of the dominance of English in message forums and mail lists. Messages on the Usenet newsgroups are overwhelmingly written in English, and the bulk of the moderated mailing lists (including the Linguist Discussion List, and international E-mail discussion list for linguists) are conducted in English.