By most accounts, English, a strange amalgam of German, Latin, French, and everything else it has encountered in its travels, has been wildly successful. Between British imperialism and American bullyism, it has eclipsed every other language, living, dead, or invented, in the competition for common tongue.

French, once the language of diplomacy, has pretty much run out of gas. Chinese and Japanese seem to be harder for Westerners to learn than our languages are for people in China and Japan. (Everyone in Japan speaks English, or at least they think they do.) Russian is in decline. Esperanto never got off the ground. Even the Catholics have given up on Latin.

Which brings us to Nana Mouskouri and the Internet.

Mouskouri is the best-selling female singer of all time, with 800 million records sold. To call her the Barbra Streisand of Europe, as people do, is probably a bigger compliment to Streisand than to her. Greek by birth and Parisian by choice, she is fluent in six languages and is a member of the new European Parliament, where she has been sounding off loudly and eloquently lately on the tyranny of the English language.

Her view is that the less influential nations of the world, fed a steady diet of English, are eventually going to lose their own languages, and with them their own uniqueness, and with that their economic niche in the world. This is the same argument France has had with American movies -- that our global blockbusters are killing off their human-scale film industries.

Mouskouri has condemned the European Union's tendency to do business in English. One of the sops the EU has offered to the UK, which worries about its own loss of sovereignty under the new union, has been the primacy of English as a more or less official language of Europe.

Earlier this year she challenged the French Foreign Minister over a French plan to reduce the number of EU working languages to five, which would have effectively made lesser-known languages like Greek second-class languages. Faced with a torrent of criticism from affected countries and Mouskouri's fans, France, the plan's proponent, hastily withdrew it.

Now she is taking aim at the Internet, where, since it was designed by the U.S. for American use, English has always been the official language. English-only, Mouskouri says, "would create a danger for citizens of the EU being excluded from the information society and the information highway." It will marginalize smaller languages even more, increase the gulf between rich and poor, and damage Europe's cultural diversity, she says.

"It's essential that we protect that cultural heritage," she says, "and make sure it's not destroyed by the information society, which would then be an information society with no content."

Mouskouri would like to see Internet system that mirrors Europe itself, with information offered in many languages, with guidelines for providing access in many different languages and sanctions for institutional users offering the linguistic diversity of the region.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is that the Internet owes much of its spectacular success to its universality. Protocols, headings, and reliance on a single language (more or less) have been important drivers of that success. To pull the pin on English could turn the new global community into Babel overnight. People need assurance that they won't be barred from access to vital information on the ground that they don't speak Afrikaans.

The other is that English is only "universal" by fiat; no one asked Hungary or Kuwait about it. One of the great threats posed by Big Information is the erasure of what makes us what we are. In the real world the rush to sameness achieves an endless stream of Burger Kings, Starbucks, and Jiffy Lubes circling our planet like the rings of Saturn. In the virtual world, sameness is just as deadening. How much differentness can a world lose and still call itself a world?

My view comes down somewhere in the middle. I like English, and I don't enjoy latching onto some juicy-looking information I can't make head or tail of. But I also like the idea of an unregulated net.

Why not just let people do what they want to do? If you see benefit in doing business in a common language, do it. If you prefer doing it in Bengali, and are content with a smaller audience, do that, and call it an intranet.

English has already slipped as the Internet standard. A search for nearly any topic will find as many non-English as English sites -- Finnish, Ryuku, Quechua, and Swahili sites, all in their native alphabets, co-exist side by side with English sites. There are entire Usenet sections set aside for different languages.

That's the spirit of the net. When has government, especially world government, shown itself adept at putting its own communication in order, much less ours? Let the language police phase out before they gear up. And let Nana return to what she does best.

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