It is a convenient means of making information more widely available to a wider
audience than the printed Ethnologue provides.

On the other hand, many people in the audience we wish to reach do not have
access to computers, so in some ways the Ethnologue on Internet reaches a
limited audience who own computers. I am particularly thinking of people in the
so-called 'third world'."

Created in December 1995 by Yoshi Mikami of Asia Info Network, The Languages of
the World by Computers and the Internet (commonly called Logos Home Page or
Kotoba Home Page) gives, for each language, its brief history, features, writing
system, and character set and keyboard for computers and the Internet
processing. In his e-mail of December 17, 1998, Yoshi Mikami wrote:

"My native tongue is Japanese. Because I had my graduate education in the US and
worked in the computer business, I became bilingual Japanese/American English. I
was always interested in different languages and cultures, so I learned some
Russian, French and Chinese along the way. In late 1995, I created on the Web
The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet and tried to summarize
there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and
computer processing for each of the six major languages of the world, in English
and Japanese. As I gained more experience, I invited my two associates to write
a book on viewing, understanding and creating the multilingual web pages, which
was published in August, 1997, as "The Multilingual Web Guide" (see its support
page) in the Japanese edition, the world's first book on such a subject.

Thousands of years ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more
conscious about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one language,
but in different languages. In our modern world, each nation state has adopted
more or less one language for its own use. I see in the future of the Internet a
greater use of different languages and multilingual pages, not a simple
gravitation to American English, and a more creative use of multilingual
computer translation. Ninety nine percent of the Webs created in Japan are
written in Japanese!"

Maintained on the website of the College Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Island of Skye,
Scotland, by Caoimhin P. O Donnaile, European Minority Languages is a list of
minority languages by alphabetic order and by language family. The site also
gives links to other sites dealing with the