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Comment by FartyMcFarter | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I believe this paragraph:

> I’ve worked on many multinational collaborations, and I notice that European researchers often speak to each other in their native languages. However, it’s relatively uncommon to see Chinese or South Korean scientists talking to each other in their own language in an academic setting away from their home country. They just don’t feel comfortable.

In my experience, Chinese are one of the most likely to form little cliques with their compatriots when abroad (and speak their own language while at it). They're not the only ones to do so, but they definitely seem to do it more than average.

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I hear equal amounts of Mandarin, Hindi, and Portugese around my current lab. Honestly, the people least likely to speak their native tongue are the few Germans floating around. So my personal experience is closer to yours than that expressed in the original article.

Germans (stereotypically) prefer to speak English poorly over speaking German if there is the possibility that a non-German listener might be interested, the other's German is not 100% perfect or the other is a german wanting to learn english.

In my first job I worked with a lot of Chinese Malaysians, and I remember one time we were in the car going somewhere for lunch. We'd all been conversing in English - for context, this is in Australia where English is the overwhelmingly predominant language, and I was the only non-CM in the car - but when a couple of them started talking directly to each other they started chattering away in... something else, and others joined in it was all incomprehensible.

I said something about them switching languages on me and they said, "No we didn't." And apparently they were still speaking English but when conversing more directly with each other that in the group their accent went so thick and fast it honestly sounded like a foreign language to my uneducated ear. They were totally unaware of this and were really surprised when I said I couldn't understand what they were saying anymore. Made for ongoing jokes for a month or two.

Ha ha, yes. I had a similar experience on Grand Cayman. My host seemed like a totally native english speaker -- until a few days in when a friend came by and they started a little good-natured ribbing over a recent fishing expedition -- they dropped into Caymanian, which is "English" of a very Scotts-influenced and evolved-in-isolation sort. I got nothing out of it except that they both seemed to be in good humor.

The language barrier is most likely the cause. For some reason people from some countries like Russia, China, France etc. struggle with English and they'll seek a way to communicate however they can, usually by finding fellow countrymen.

At least in my experience, in the Bay area, Russians are some of the best at English. There were a couple times where I was at a Russian social gathering and I thought I was around people born and raised in the US but it turned out they moved to the US from Russia when they turned 18.

You don't have to "believe" it, it's a personal anecdote, just like yours. No conclusive evidence has been entered either way.

I've worked with multiple groups of foreign nationals at multiple jobs, and no discernable pattern related to ethnicity emerged. Sometimes one group would talk in their native tongue, sometimes not. It turns out that stereotype isn't a reliable metric.

Academic settings like discussion panel in professional conference? No.

Private gathering during professional conference? Yes.

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