[mickeypi]

If the internet were used only to publish read-only content, like a magazine, then maybe this would make some sense.

But language shapes thought. It actually limits it. If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it. People who speak different languages actually see the world in different ways, with different nuances and details.

And the internet is highly interactive, collaborative and social. You don't have to look beyond HN to see great examples of this.

This means that limiting the internet through a single language means we would be also limiting our ability to form, spread and implement new ideas.

Creativity often comes from finding a curious analogy that crosses domains. If one of those domains has only a poor English representation then it's unlikely that the brainsinvolved in an English-only conversation would discover the novel analogy.

So no, that would not be good for the internet as canvas of collaboration and communication of ideas and thoughts.

[rspeer]

> If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it.

This is a fairly strong statement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is not widely believed.

You can state the hypothesis in various ways, ranging from the strong hypothesis ("you can't think things that aren't in your language", which is clearly false because you can learn new things about language) to weak ("language kinda influences your thoughts").

There is evidence in favor of what I'd call the "extremely weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis": that language can influence the way you judge things that are established by convention such as colors and directions, in experiments that are specifically designed to emphasize these distinctions, sometimes.