Page 300 - Culture Technology Communication

Language, Power, and Software

Kenneth Keniston

In discussions of the impact of “The Information Age,” the role of lan-
guage in computing is rarely mentioned. Hundreds of books have an-
alyzed the digital age, the networked society, the cyberworld,
computer-mediated communications (CMC), the impact of the new
electronic media with hardly a word about the central importance of
language in the Information Age.
The goal of this paper is to give language—by which I mean the
language in which computing is done and in which computer-medi-
ated communication occurs—a key place in discussions of the impact
of computation and computer-mediated communications. I will
argue that the language in which computing takes place is a critical
variable in determining who benefits, who loses, who gains, who is
excluded, who is included—in short, how the Information Age im-
pacts the peoples and the cultures of the world. In other words, I will
stress the relationship of language to power, wealth, privilege, and
access to desired resources.

Localization and Language

Although the ultimate “language” of the computer consists of digital
zeroes and ones, the language of users, including programmers, is
and must be one of the thousands of existing languages of the world.
In fact, virtually all programming languages, all operating systems,
and most applications are written originally in English, making lan-
guage a “non-issue” for the approximately seven percent of the
world’s population that speaks, reads, and writes fluent English.
Since all major operating systems and applications are written
in English (with the exception of the systems written for the German

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