The many languages missing from the internet
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It's very easy for native English speakers to say English should be the only language because it has only upsides for them, and they need not give up anything, and they have never been coerced into using it. Whereas I suspect 99% of people who say things like "we don't need UTF-8, the world can be ASCII-only" would go absolutely bananas if they woke up tomorrow and found that HN was now a mandatory-Mandarin forum.
Some minority languages were actively suppressed during the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was part of the point of the "residential schools" system of Canada, Australia and elsewhere: take children away from their parents and beat their language out of them.
A few languages have managed to go from repressed to national language status: Irish, Hebrew, probably others.
I don't see how me writing a tech article in English or my own language means abandoning others "culture, literature (not necessarily written!)".
Am I required to learn 7000 languages?
It's also very easy to assume that everyone advocating for using a common language is a native English speaker.
Irish has had "national language" status for 100 years, during which time it has continued to decline. Strong government support for the language - making it a requirement for government jobs, teaching it to schoolchildren, defining regions of the country where Irish should be the primary everyday language - weren't enough to prevent the continued decline of the language.
I think the problem with the sort of language policy that Ireland pursued is that language is a practical tool for most people. A lot of people liked the idea of Irish coming back (especially back when speaking Irish was a political statement against English colonialism), but in everyday life in Ireland, English is vastly more useful. The last monolingual Irish speaker died in 1998.[1] You will never encounter anyone who only knows how to speak Irish. Back when there were monolingual Irish speakers, they lived in some of the poorest areas of Ireland and hoped that their children would learn English, so that they would have better opportunities.
In some ways, the language policy backfired. Some people actually viewed it as oppressive, because they didn't see the point of learning a language that was of no practical use to them in everyday life, and they weren't able to get certain jobs unless they spoke that language.
There's a funny TV series that explores how useful the Irish language is in everyday life, which aired on Ireland's Irish-language station.[2] The host tries to go through his life using only Irish. Most of the Irish people he encounters have the proficiency of your average adult who took a foreign language many years ago in school and never used it again. A few people can speak it well. Many more are confused. But it's sobering to watch it and think about what it would actually take to revive Irish as the primary language of communication in Ireland, or why you would want to do so.
With Irish, there's also the peculiarity that it's not really the language of Irish culture. Ireland is world-famous for its English-language literature.
1. Seán Ó hEinirí: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_%C3%93_hEinir%C3%AD
2. No Béarla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyll-bBZzyk
Meanwhile, progressives in English speaking countries think the contrary is true.
It seems both camps are emotionally attached to their positions not being capable of considering that they are wrong about something. To err is human and so it is to think to be always correct in the important matters, I guess.
OK, maybe I'm just a pessimist, but some real reasons (if you understand the language well enough) is that English is usually the original and so the localization can be ok or bad, but it's usually not better than the original. And as I said, this is German and not some language spoken by just a few people.
That said, I'd love to know more about the generic impression of how well localization works for Spanish or Russian, languages with a lot more speakers. I suppose with UTF-8 it's at least only a few mojibake errors and not total mayhem like in the ASCII times...
And no, I'm not arguing other languages should not be on the internet but for technical stuff (and news) I somehow really prefer English, maybe it's because I've been hanging around online and in chatrooms in English for too many decades.
Maybe the benefits are just too deeply hidden or there aren't enough benefits. Possibly there is a bias in search engines that enables the hiding of resources in other languages. (While they are quite persistent to offer me results in the language of the country I'm residing in, despite doing all my searches in English.)
For those not in the know, mojibake is when text looks like garbage, usually due to text encoding errors.
Check jw.org, it's in 1017 languages !
When I am addressing to an international audience, I am writing in (poor) English because it is the lingua franca of the world now, pretty much like latin was 1000 years ago.
One of the characteristics I love about English the most is the wanton, shameless adoption of not just words but entire phrases into the lexicon. 'Frankish Tongue', nah lingua franca it is. 'long time no see' is another favorite example. Ungrammatical in English, direct word-for-word translation from Mandarin? Sure, come on in, the water's fine. No one bats an eye.
Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften
Let's imagine a different universe where the interviewee can proudly recount his achievements:
• Added a megabyte of Kaqchikel text content on the Web.
• Contributed a 1st party Kaqchikel keyboard layout to Xkb and a 3rd party layout to Android and Windows.
• Published a free to use Kaqchikel dictionary and spell checker.
• Worked with the Linux user groups in the four biggest cities to add a Kaqchikel locale pack to KDE, and spin a variant of an existing popular distro that comes with Kaqchikel out of the box.
• Distributed ten thousand kits to convert Mesoamerican Spanish keyboards into Kaqchikel.
• Found like-minded individuals and raised funds and coordinated efforts through the Kaqchikel resource centre at the university in Guatemala City.
• Lobbied the government to give indigenous languages equal status under the law.
None of this is particularly technically challenging: Kaqchikel is written in Latin.
Also: "Oxlaj Kumez is working with other activists to create a version of Wikipedia in Kaqchikel Mayan, as well as a translated version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser."
So, he tries to do whatever he can. And perhaps he has also a life and a real job.
I didn't know him and i have no axe to grind. i just find you reaction very weird and overly aggressive.
False, you chose to interpret my post that way.
> not a technologist
This is relevant to two points out of seven, both of which he could just delegate and oversee.
I am disappointed in the substandard level of discourse you bring into this thread. The site rules prevent me from speaking my mind any further, so I'm out of here.
The other important point, is to look forward on how the Internet can help to preserve languages for future generations. We are in an unique place were we can save human culture for future generations to study.
I know the feeling from my travels thru China. I was able to access Internet, but the language barrier was always present. It was an interesting experience to see how many non-English speakers experience the Internet.
Our work isn't listed on any of these pages about which indigenous languages are on the internet because we don't want it to be, these pages are for tribal citizen use only. So, there may be a lot more written languages in use somehow than the author believes. But who knows.
There is a lot of internet interaction that happens privately/semi-privately in chat applications like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, etc.
From my limited personal experience, communities who speak and are able to write in minority languages continue to do so in their communication via these apps even though they may have a small appearance on public websites. Of course, for communities that do no have a written form for their language or very few know it, then this is less likely the case.
Ultimately you have to make a choice. Do you wall yourself off to keep foreign language from overly influencing you or do you give up a part of yourself to join the conversation?
Anecdotally, the working class people I've talked to care a lot more about the opportunities they get from learning English than they do about preserving the legacy of their language.