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Comment by iamthirsty | Hacker News Reader

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iamthirsty

On a predominately English forum, that is based out of the U.S.

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What would an EU hacker news look like? Would lingua franca would they use?

In Europe, probably English. [1]

Anywhere else: Arabic (Mid East/Africa), Chinese (Asia), Spanish (South America).

[1]: https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21721861-despite-jean-...

Not true for Asia. Perhaps some smaller South-East Asian countries have seen the writing on the wall and started learning Chinese, but for the most part the defining characteristic of Asian countries is that they each pretend they are the only Asian country.

English gets you pretty far outside of china. If there is one language you need to know as a tourist, English is it.

For Africa either English or French, probably one of each, for the Middle East either French or English, French for former French colonies, English for the Gulf because all the IT people are from the Indian subcontinent, maybe Arabic for Egypt and the Levant but probably English too. Educated Arabic speakers have to learn one of English or French to be anywhere near state of the art in anything. More books are translated into Dutch every year than into Arabic.

Only half of South America speaks Spanish.

What does the other half speaks? Brasilian/Portuguese or something else?

Yes, Portuguese.

Population of South America: 421M¹

Population of Brazil: 208M²

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_America

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil

Yes, exactly.

> What would an EU hacker news look like?

It would look like the current EU Hacker News: nonexistent.

Despite having, relatively speaking, [some islands of] fairly decent English education, EU doesn't have broad native-level English literacy. The level of discussions in English is fairly low, and people are not as likely to recognize or casually learn cross-disciplinary jargon like full time English speakers.

It's relatively straightforward for a native English speaker to enter into discussions at the level of HN, but for somebody who does not use English absolutely every day in every function of daily life, it'll be a chore.

What exactly to you base your assertions on? For me as a Norwegian it is perfectly natural to read HN. For many Europeans tech is primarly done in english. When studying at Uni we use english books in most tech fields. Most European countries are too small to rely exclusively on a home market and hence is used to doing businness abroad and working in english. I work for a Norewgian company but all our company wide emails are written in english and so is most documentation. In fact our software does not exist with an Norwegian language localization. And as with many other Norwegians and I suppose many other europeans I have no idea what most software concepts are called in my native language.

Speaking from Germany:

While lots of professionals speak English more or less well, what is telling to me and a big indicator that the situation does not look as good as some people want to believe is the fact that there is hardly any English-language cinema or movies/series (on TV).

Even where I am, a major German city, there is the one huge cinema complex (10 cinemas) that only shows 2 or 3 English language movies - in their smallest rooms and with less than 10% of seats taken. Every single movie and TV series gets German speakers for this market.

I can't say how reliable of an indicator this is, but I think given that this stuff (TV and cinema) still is a huge part of daily mass entertainment the fact that those offering the (often originally US-made) material choose to spend a lot of effort creating a German voice track pretty much without exception probably is significant.

Germany is big enough, both population- and business-wise, to not have to lean nearly as much on English compared to smaller countries.

You also see this in book translations. Here in Denmark, the choice is sometimes rather limited (outside of bestsellers) and the translation quality suffers. Compare this to Germany, where the market is significantly larger, so more more and higher quality translations are available.

I'm Danish and my girlfriend is German, and I definitely notice the difference whenever I visit her family in Baden-Württemberg.

I also noticed it while I was studying. Technical documentation was usually only available in English and German. When you have a population of >80 million people, there is a large incentive for producing native language products.

As a consequence, a lot of Germans over a certain age simply do not speak English very well, or at all.

Norway is among exceptions (Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg), as far as I can tell, with a combined English literate population under that of say... Canada[0]. Most seem to (understandably) support their native language at the expense of English. Granted Germany, Austria, Poland, and Belgium all have relatively high English proficiency nonetheless, but it isn't anywhere near as ubiquitous as it is in Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Luxembourg.

[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Population+of+Norway+%...

Actually, Flanders ( part of Belgium) speaks Dutch, French and English ( even some German), you are talking about Wallonia

Taking part in asynchronous internet discussions is wildly easier than any face to face communication. The blend of written, yet informal language used on the net makes it very easy to participate. In quality of writing, HN might be leaps and bounds above a random youtube comment thread, but that still does not make it particularly difficult.

Source: I feel quite at home commenting here, but I'm a mumbling wreckage when navigating the day to day linguistic perils of e.g. something as trivial as a US supermarket checkout.

> Source: I feel quite at home commenting here, but I'm a mumbling wreckage when navigating the day to day linguistic perils of e.g. something as trivial as a US supermarket checkout.

Yeah, I think that's a fairly common issue (overspecialization). I have that problem with studying Japanese: I get most of my practice in listening, so I can listen to and understand at a level far above my speaking, reading, or writing.

Exactly. That is kind of my point. Many europeans are able to participate in technical discussion in english even if our regular english is lacking. When I visited relatives in the US I noticed the problem that I could speak of computer science topics, history etc without problems, but struggled big time even naming the most basic food items. I knew what spam email was but was unaware that it was an actual food product until I visted wallmart and saw spam on the shelf which made laugh far more than perhaps such an observation reasonably warants.

I also can’t read a lot of regular prose very well. I can read any technical subject quite well though.

To be fair I was shocked when visiting the US how bad many Americans are at formulating themselves on paper.

> To be fair I was shocked when visiting the US how bad many Americans are at formulating themselves on paper.

The thing about English is that it's such a clusterfuck; slang, contractions, and "incorrect" grammar are hard to criticize when the language is already such a mess. Partly in jest, I liken it to a linguistic Broken Windows Theory[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

I'm aware but if there were a central place then, as iamthirsty replied, English would most likely end up the default there. This was to help support k_ and eclectic's points.

Honestly, it might be interesting if there were a central, yet multilingual, place where tech-oriented Europeans could congregate just to see what would happen.

Interesting you think that. That is a broad underestimation of European command of the English language.

I think as a broad generalization over European populations, it's fairly accurate. Few people whose job does not require English proficiency are going to come anywhere close to fluency.

Of course the subset of the population that is likely to end up on "European Hacker News" would mostly consist of at least part-time English speakers. But then what is going to keep non-European English speakers out of that forum?

I don't think HN would look any different if it were hosted in Europe. Any website with mostly English content is going to be dominated by visitors from the US.

In Germany, maybe.

I speak English fairly well, but most people here just understand it when spoken to them, they can't speak it fluently.

But in the BeNeLux or Scandinavian countries people speak english rather fluently, even if they don't need it at their jobs.

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