Leaders of more than 50 states and territories belonging to French-speaking nations are meeting in Moncton in New Brunswick, eastern Canada, for their two-yearly summit.

As ever, the future of French as an international language is a matter of great concern.

French speakers fear that the domination of English as a universal common tongue on and off the Internet will further marginalise their language, already in retreat in many parts of the world.

President Jacques Chirac recently told a meeting of his country's ambassadors that 80% of Internet web pages were in English, though only 10% of the world's population spoke the language.

Other estimates put the proportion at 60-80%; but in any event there is no doubting the numerical superiority of English-language sites.

French is reported to be the most used Latin language on the Web, ahead of Spanish, but even so only 3.5% of web pages are in French.

Minitel

The battle to preserve French as a language on the Internet has taken some curious turns, as when some years ago associations for the defence of the French language sought to prosecute the French campus of an American university because its Website used English rather than French.

President Chirac fighting against a French retreat

The education minister Claude Allegre came under criticism when he suggested that English should be regarded as an educational tool rather than a foreign language.

The French have been slow to take to the Internet and accept the computer revolution, partly because they pioneered a primitive form of Internet known as the Minitel, which performs on a limited and national scale some of the functions of the Internet.

Recent surveys showed that 7-8% of French people had access to the Internet, usually through their places of work.

But in recent months, prompted by aggressive marketing, sales of computers have exploded and scores of Internet Service Providers have entered the field, though the high cost of local calls is an issue of contention.

This month alone 300,000 computers are expected to be sold, chiefly through big supermarkets.

The problem for those who wish to see French more widely used is that in some states belonging to La Francophonie - as the association of French speaking nations is known - French is hardly spoken at all, Vietnam being a case in point, where one person in 200 is a French-speaker.

Where French is widely spoken, notably in sub-Saharan and North Africa, income levels and infrastructure problems mean that it will be decades before personal computers are widely used.

Some optimism comes from the fact that the chief expansion in Internet use is taking place in non-English speaking countries and that by 2002 English-speaking Internet users will be in a minority.