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Comment by ittekimasu | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you understand what 'lingua franca' means. No self-respecting people (in Europe/East Asia atleast) give up their languages for a common medium.

See, http://www.flipkart.com/ (only English) vs http://www.rakuten.co.jp/ (English/Japanese) vs http://www.baidu.com/ (Mandarin).

India is not exactly on the same stage globally as China or Japan, when it comes to Tech, despite what you claim.

It looks like http://www.aliexpress.com/ has support for more Indian languages than Flipkart. Surely supporting different languages for such a unicorn (which often shows up on HN) can't be that difficult a task ?

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>No self-respecting people (in Europe/East Asia atleast) give up their languages for a common medium.

It's not giving up the languages if we were to find a logical(because the rest of the world speaks this too) common medium to speak.

And,

I am amazed as to how you are trying to connect dots from 'you guys speak English, so you have to also support colonialism, if not, you are hypocrites and pmarca is right'.

"self-respect" is a bit misplaced here.

None of the countries you named were ruled or for that matter created by a colonial ruler with another language. India in its current form never existed, its like the EU, there are several states with their own languages, and English is the common one.

As for Aliexpress offering several languages - its just the google translate plugin ;).

India in its current form never existed, its like the EU

This is technically true in that yes, a state with precisely India's borders today did not exist before 1947. But that is a useless claim because that is true for every country in the world.

There are have been many many empires, going back all the way back at least 2300 years, and these empires have ruled the majority of the Indian subcontinent. This includes most of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan. Some of them also ruled parts of Iran, Tibet, and a little bit of Central Asia. And these empires all had linguistic diversity. The idea that one language = one country is a stupid byproduct of European nationalist movements.

India has about 18 official languages. Its hard to support all the official languages.

Also, the people who are online are mostly people who understand English. Supporting languages does not increase their outreach.

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