French wary of new cyber language

France has a new enemy in its battle to protect the language of Moliere: the search engine Google, which French critics says is bent on a new act of Anglophone cultural imperialism.

Moves by the United States corporation to create a digital library scanning millions of university books and putting them online have prompted new fears in Paris about American domination of cyberspace.

Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of the French National Library, which houses 13 million books, this week published a book presenting a nightmare vision of Google being in a position to hijack "the thought of the world".

"I think that this could lead to an imbalance to the benefit of a mainly Anglo-Saxon view of the world," he said. "I think this is a danger."

Google's project involves scanning books in four university libraries - Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan - as well as the New York Public Library and putting them online. The worry is that the "Google Print" project would rank sources in order of popularity, thereby giving prominence to Anglophone texts above those in other languages.

The issue touches a raw nerve in France, where intellectuals and politicians are alarmed at the diminishing influence of French as a global language. The Government spends millions of euros on subsidising French cinema to ensure its survival against Hollywood imports. In the new EU constitution it secured a special exemption clause from competition law to allow it to continue to do so.

In response to Google's plans, France is leading six European countries in calling for a "European digital library".

However, Pierre Buhler, an associate professor at Sciences-Po in Paris accused Jeanneney of calling for the "first cultural war in cyberspace". He wrote in the International Herald Tribune that less than half of Harvard's 15 million books were in English and texts in other languages would be central to Google's project.

- INDEPENDENT