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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

I think there's something like 24 national languages in the EU. I can hardly blame hetzner for not translating their services to say polish and think it's entirely the wrong approach anyway.

It's really true language is a big barrier but honestly the solution cannot be for every single company to offer services in 20 languages. It can't be. English must be adopted.

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    > English must be adopted.

I cringe when I read this. Why not German? There are more native German speakers than any other language in the EU. Also, in the age of LLMs, translating (on a best effort basis) to (at least) 24 different languages is trivial.

That sounds like a very German approach to the whole thing.

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... and look at the total speakers vs. native speakers.

Now it should be clear why one is better than the other. The shared language of most is English, so you have the least amount of "extra learning" required.

Also, the number for German is generous in that it includes people that speak wildly "incompatible" dialects and accents. While people in Bavaria technically speak "German" and having them talk to other people that speak "German" (with various dialects) is easier than asking either to speak English as their primary language, that doesn't really solve the problem of even intra-German language rivalry.

Of course one thing will unite Bavarian and Saxon and Swiss and Austrian German and other highly accented/dialectic German speakers: They'd rather speak "German" (and deal with weird pronunciation/words) than English as an official language ;)

I have asked multiple native German speakers about the "linguistic distance" between various styles within the Federal Republic of Germany. It is completely overstated that people don't understand each other or are "annoyed". All German children grow up learning standard German in schools. Yes, they may speak a different at home and in the community, but they are all fluent in standard German. I am pretty sure most standard German speakers can communicate clearly with all of Germany, most of Austria... and Switzerland is a roll of the dice. Still, anyone in the German-speaking half of Switzerland that is university educated will surely speak standard German. Again, they may speak Schweizer Deutsch with their family and friends, but can also speak standard German, especially in a business setting.

That is basically what I was saying. The "air quotes" were meant to actually be read.

What unites them is the German language when there is an outside "threat": English.

Otherwise there's squabble and language is part of it.

It didn't work out well the first couple of times they tried it.

Why work work with native language rather than spoken? According to wikipedia less than 20% of the EU is a native German speaker while 47% speak English. When talking about technical people who may be looking into something like Hetzner it is probably higher than 47%.

> Why not German?

Are there more distinct markets in the EU/EEC where adopting german would give you a quantifiable economic and/or competitive advantage over adopting english?

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