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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

We definitely need more focus on creating a true single market.

It’s going to be difficult to achieve this without the establishment of a single official language. That’s where the US gets most of its advantage: a large population of English speakers means a large single market for products in English.

Sure, lots of products (like food) don’t care about language but software and media (literature, music, video games, movies, TV) definitely do. It’s no coincidence that the US dominates the global market for those cultural and technology products.

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I have a decade of experience working with european companies, digital and not. Language is not a barrier at all.

Laws and regulations are.

>> It’s going to be difficult to achieve this without the establishment of a single official language

Swiss confederation solved this while having 4 official languages. Language is not the problem, especially nowadays when everything could be translated in a second.

Ehhh, the story of Swiss multilingualism is more than a bit romanticized. A lot of people under 40 know their region's language, English at a decent level, and at best a barely passable 2nd national language (exception would be those living in the actually bilingual regions).

I think there's a strong case to be made that, while the different Swiss linguistic regions strongly prefer to associate together, in reality they draw a lot from the countries they share their languages & borders with when it comes to business and markets, etc. But between linguistic regions, there is additional friction for sure. If anything, the share competency in English has been a major boon.

Source: been living in Switzerland for 10 years and very interested in its system.

software is a bad example since all the coding is done in english. the translation tools are inexpensive nowadays. bilingual persons have lower rates of dementia so it's not even sure that standardising on one language would be a net benefit. also it's universally accepted that english is one of the more difficult languages to learn. If there was a revival of the movement for a single language then english wouldn't be picked by non native english speakers.

Esperanto for all! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

How much easier is it to learn Esperanto than some broken form of simplified English that gets the message across and then also enables you to speak the native language of 26% of the world GDP?

If my concern is % of GDP I'd rather learn Mandarin.

I tried to learn Mandarin and it's really hard! That's coming from someone who is able to say Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz without a problem.

I feel the perceived difficulty varies from person to person. Personally I found Mandarin much easier to pick up than German or Spanish, since you don't have to worry about conjugation.

It's not the language that is a problem. The economic statistics simply show that A LOT of people are going to have to work harder for less money (and with inflation I'm sure they can make it look like they earn more, they just can't actually earn more)

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