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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

By your logic, chinese english or indian english are the defacto as they massively outnumber american english

You just mean that you visit more american sites than other non-US english speaking sites

Go to France, or Japan, or Hungary, or somewhere like that. Someone there is visiting a web site that is in English. Now, what English is it most likely to be?

My guess is US English, not UK English, not Indian English, not Chinese English. Sure, they may visit some of those sites, but I suspect that the most frequent will be US English.

Correct, generally speaking they will have their own default locales on their computer and local sites will be in e.g. French but going to Instagram it will render in US English - unless the app has been translated, which it probably has so it's not the best example.

I've just checked my instagram and it's using the UK spelling "favourites"

Where are you, by the way?

I'm in IT right now having travelled through FR, DE, NO, PL and half a dozen more countries. When selecting the EN option on a website it is almost 100% of the time with a GB flag. The spelling is mostly en-GB as well.

In this case, Japan is special. There relationship (post WW2) with the US is unparalleled compared to France or Hungary. It will absolutely be US style. Japan was never very close with the UK.

Yeah, I think the only 2 countries that teach american english are Japan and the Philippines

Most countries in North East Asia or South East Asia (exclude South Asia) teach US-style English. A few that come to mind: South Korea, Taiwan, Mainland China, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia.

> not Indian English, not Chinese English

There is no such thing as Chinese English, unless you politely mean "English as incorrect spoken by Chinese native speakers."

There's a national english for anywhere it's widely spoken, that's just how international languages like english and french work.

You're confusing number of speakers with convention or standard setting power.

Look at the places where US english has become the norm or convention; programming, media, apps, business, Internet in general.

And the US is in unique position - it drives technology forward quite a bit, and it's also actual native English speakers.

So in other words got more to do with technological and economic influence, not population size.

According to wikipedia, there's 128 millions of en-IN speakers, of which only few hundred thousands are native - while there's 248 million native en-US speakers.

You raise a great point here. At what point will a non-English speaking country become the nation with the most English speakers? In my mind, surely that is Indian by 2050. If they can become upper middle income by that time (I am sure of it), then I guess more that half of adults will speak English at least at elementary to middle school level. (Dear reader: Please don't read that as a slight against the English language skills of Indians. I know from personal experience: With five grade level language skills, you can get a lot done!) They would way out number the number of English speaking Americans.

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