Editorial

ith its present issue, UNESCO’s International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), takes up again the thematic debate on linguistic diversity, linguistic rights, and language policies. Previous contributions to that debate concentrated on the socio-legal protection of lesser used languages and of linguistic minorities (see Vol. 3, No. 1 & 2) as well as on the socio-linguistic analysis of the causes, circumstances and results of language endangerment (Vol. 4, No. 2). Despite the variety of situations analysed in these articles, they collectively highlight that the processes of language loss or maintenance are to a considerable degree shaped by public language policies in fields such as law, administration, media, and education. The present issue addresses a field of language use which is increasingly relevant for communication and, at the same time, less susceptible to state intervention: the Internet. W The Internet as the major example of new electronic information and communi-cation technologies (ICTs), in fact, affects patterns of language use in many respects. On the one hand, it seems to support the trends of linguistic standard-isation which accompany the more general processes of globalisation; the spread of English as a lingua franca of the Internet immediately comes to mind. In this sense, the “digital gap ” characteristic of the current state of the knowledge and infor-mation society and the unequal use of language on the Internet seem to reinforce each other. On the other hand, the Internet may actually support the maintenance of local minority languages in situations, where access to national spheres of communication is restricted and conventional resources for storing multilingual information are scarce. In this context, UNESCO is actively pursuing several initiatives to promote multilingualism on the Internet. Thus, following up on its “Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity ” (2001), UNESCO’s General Conference recently adopted the “Recommendation Concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism an