
English is no longer the language of the web - hermanywong
http://qz.com/96054/english-is-no-longer-the-language-of-the-web/
======
Havoc
>English will be a language of economic opportunity for most speakers: they’ll
work and think in their mother tongue

I'm not sure I agree with that. I grew up with German as my mother tongue, but
with a strong English environmental influence (TV, strangers on street etc).
Both taught as 1st language in school.

It starts out with "thinking in one language, speaking another", but as you
improve in both it just becomes a blur - to the point where I can't tell you
whether the thought I just had was in English or German. Sometimes I think the
thought just "is" as an abstract concept language-less concept. Sort-of like a
geometric shape isn't German or English.

~~~
Aqua_Geek
> Sometimes I think the thought just "is" as an abstract concept language-less
> concept. Sort-of like a geometric shape isn't German or English.

I've found that learning another language becomes incredibly easier if you can
get to that point - linking words in the new language to the idea of the thing
itself instead of the word for the thing in your mother tongue.

~~~
Havoc
Frankly it took me years to get there (English) - and that was with teachers
that were well flawless. Languages isn't really my strong suit and I doubt
I'll learn any more.

Regarding German...I'd glad I learned it while I was a kid...its a bitch of
language to learn. My school subsidized some of the poor locals - on the
condition that they take German as 3rd language. Man those people suffered.
Then again they got an education 10x better than anything they could have
hoped for otherwise so fair trade.

------
dfc
If Lessig was correct when he said that "code is law," I am not sure how
anything other than English could be the language of the web. RFCs
inform/direct/control the creation of code and RFC Series Format Requirements
and Future Development[1] reads:

    
    
        2.1.2
        *  The IETF works in ASCII (and English).  The Internet research,
        design, and development communities function almost entirely in
        English.  That strongly suggests that an ASCII document can be
        properly rendered and read by everyone in the communities and
        audiences of interest.
    
    
       3.3
        The official language of the RFC Series is English.  ASCII is
        required for all text that must be read to understand or
        implement the technology described in the RFC.  Use of non-
        ASCII characters, expressed in a standard Unicode Encoding
        Form (such as UTF-8), must receive explicit approval from the
        document stream manager and will be allowed after the rules
        for the common use cases are defined in the Style Guide.
    

[1] [https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6949.txt](https://www.rfc-
editor.org/rfc/rfc6949.txt)

------
lostnet
Interesting to think about, but the publicly searchable web seems like the
only meaningful number to me.

Ok, there may be a whole bunch of social media in some language each
accessible to small groups of facebook users. Does that help the average
speaker of that language find a manual, recipe, learn a programming language,
etc?

~~~
lcedp
Good point.

------
CyberFonic
The BIG obstacles to multi-language computing are computer keyboards,
operating systems and spell-checkers/dictionaries.

It is very difficult to write in several languages on all common operating
systems. Sure you can have an English keyboard and use some on-screen means
for writing accented characters but that is a real pain if you want to write
more than a few words.

There is no such thing as a "universal" keyboard. If there were, it would have
to be enormous. Just look at the newspaper typesetting keyboards for Chinese
newspapers.

Most operating systems can be configured to handle a single language, but very
awkward when you want to seamlessly switch to another.

Spell-checkers/dictionaries in other languages are not as capable, accurate as
English ones.

So ... if we wish to promote real multi-lingual web, we really need to address
these core issues. Having unicode and different character sets is but a very
small part of the solution. There is lots more work to be done.

~~~
Dewie
> Spell-checkers/dictionaries in other languages are not as capable, accurate
> as English ones.

But they are less needed in certain languages. If you know how a Spanish word
is pronounced, you can probably guess how it is written. If you are uncertain
of an English word... well I'd take a dictionary over memorizations and "rules
of thumbs" when it comes to the gigantic mess that is English spelling.

~~~
CyberFonic
That's very true. But when I need to write in a language that I'm not fluent
in, it would be nice to have a competent spell checker, etc. For example, my
Spanish pronunciation is rather poor, so chances are that I would also
misspell words when I write them. And it is very easy to innocently write
something which turns out to be rude or even vulgar.

------
diminoten
It's a great point, _but_ I think as long as most programming languages are
chiefly written in English (I think?), the web will still be "English".

Which I guess is a question I am curious about - how widespread is foreign-
language programming language use? Like, instead of "while" it's "正在", etc.?

~~~
agravier
Code I have encountered that was made in France most often used French
variable names and comments, and documented in French if required otherwise.
It shows that the language in which programming keywords are didn't influence
those programmers enough to change the language in which they were thinking.
(If that's the argument you are trying to make)

~~~
nawitus
The code and comments I've seen in Finland have always been in English. France
is probably an exception, as they value their own language a lot.

------
lcedp
English is a (dominant) language of the web. Perhaps not quantitatively
already, but qualitatively it still is.

Time to draw some attention to contracted languages (i.e. Esperanto). It would
be a much more unbiased and time-saving choice for the world community.

~~~
MichaelGG
Esperanto is far from "unbiased" \- it's obviously extremely influenced by
European languages. It's not a fundamentally great design either. E.g. no non-
gender pronoun, for some reason. Use of diacritics and extra pronunciation
rules are also a negative.

Moving to Esperanto would not save time at all, and would be significantly
more difficult for the many people that now have to learn yet another very
Euro-centric language with complicated. And, there's really very little
benefit to switching.

Making up a language won't gain traction. Even most programmers can't figure
out how to write/read decent programming languages Why on earth would we think
the rest of humanity will accept it for spoken language? And at any rate, it'd
have to be a lot better than Esperanto or alternatives for it to be
worthwhile.

~~~
lcedp
> Esperanto is far from "unbiased" \- it's obviously extremely influenced by
> European languages.

I agree here! It's so much easier to learn for English or Spanish speaker. But
still Chinese or Japanese speaker will learn Esperanto 10 times faster then
English. Huge improvement.

> E.g. no non-gender pronoun, for some reason.

Well, most languages including English doesn't have non-gender pronoun. Yet in
Esperanto officially you can use "ĝi" (it) or "tiu" (that person) for
referring to the person of unknown/unspecified gender. But people seem not to
use it often.

>Use of diacritics and extra pronunciation rules are also a negative.

Majority of languages use diacritics or non-latin writing system and steel
doing fine. It's not that hard. But as a trade-off you get one sound - one
letter philosophy.

> Moving to Esperanto would not save time at all, and would be significantly
> more difficult for the many people that now have to learn yet another very
> Euro-centric language with complicated. And, there's really very little
> benefit to switching.

Moving to Esperanto is like moving from Latin numbers to Arabic. Yes, sorry,
it will require at least some learning to use.

> Making up a language won't gain traction. Even most programmers can't figure
> out how to write/read decent programming languages

We don't need most to create something good.

> Why on earth would we think the rest of humanity will accept it for spoken
> language?

I don't thing so. But there are good reasons mentioned in this comment.

> And at any rate, it'd have to be a lot better than Esperanto or alternatives
> for it to be worthwhile.

It's pretty awesome, really. I was skeptical too until I tried.

~~~
NonEUCitizen
A Chinese would rather learn English and trade with most of the world (then
Spanish, and trade with 400M people), than learn Esperanto even if it's
"easier."

Besides, once you've learned Chinese, any European language with an alphabet
looks easy to learn.

~~~
mtts
> Besides, once you've learned Chinese, any European language with an alphabet
> looks easy to learn.

Well, there is the fact that Chinese children learn Pinyin (Chinese
romanization) in school. Of course Pinyin attributes different sounds to the
letters of the alphabet than Western European languages do, but at least
they've already seen the characters when they start learning.

------
stretchwithme
Happens to every medium.

~~~
CyberFonic
It sure does.

Some of the issues are technical and others are cultural.

This thread focuses on the cultural issues and largely overlooks the technical
issues. That is, operating systems are only convenient in a single language.
Try using a French notebook with French keyboard to write English, especially
if you are used to the QWERT layout !

------
Dewie
Good for them. I think this trend will discourage monoculturalism.

Personally I don't care too much what language I'm using (I only have English
and my native tongue to use). But frankly I'm fed up with the amerocentric
(not a word) content that I go through. I'm fed up with reading about things
that interest me on an international platform and having to endure a majority
of America-colored views and experiences of everything. I'm tired of reading
about slightly-technical/non-technical opinion pieces having to do with
programming, and the writing clearly being about some American issue. I'm
tired of all my uni-level books being American "International Edition"
textbooks with examples ridden with calculating the mean and standard
deviation of some GPA's (stats), flights between Phoenix, NYC, Miami, LA etc
(graph theory) [insert common knowledge to anyone who has lived in the US].

This wouldn't be different if all of these things had been simply translated
to my native tongue.

All of this might seem petty, but I'm tired of being a foreigner on the Web
that I frequent. And a foreigner in the _same damn country each time_ , at
that

