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Comment by echlipse | Hacker News Reader

In India when it comes to technology we(majority) use english almost everywhere, from TV menus to phone apps to the tiny cybercafes in a remote place, everywhere it is in english even with the option of choosing our own language. This is due to a couple of reasons: we have been accustomed to the use of English with any tech product you can think of since it was first launched in India, also no one wants to go through the settings and change the defaults. Also the english dialect here is English-India. Kannada is its own language. I also came to the same conclusion as the author here, EN-CA was the first on the list.

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Not just technology either, the two languages for the Indian Parliament are Hindi and English - a relic of colonialism as well (and in a country with 20 odd languages, multiple scripts and hundreds of dialects a lingua franca is required to get anything done without translators on both sides).

The academics are still arguing over whether English is a world language or not but it is the defacto world language and I don't know of another language that can make that claim.

Curiously it's the most widely spoken language while been only the third most spoken native language.

A result of two centuries of the British Empire followed by a century of US dominance in media/business.

The only language that gets close is Mandarin but the split of native to non-native is pretty much inverted between English and Mandarin.

> the english dialect here is English-India

Do you think that users of Firefox in India would like to have “English-India” as one of the language preference choices for the browser? At present, Firefox seems to offer only United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.

In contrast, Mac OS offers eight versions of English for the system language: Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, and United States.

I can't speak for others, but me personally - it doesn't matter when it comes to the interface. I'm cool with En_IN, En_GB and En_US. Whatever the default is, I let that be. I read so much user generated content (like this thread!) where I can't control the locale, so I have to be cool with it.

I'm more particular about the input, especially if it's auto-correcting. I prefer "analyse" to "analyze" and other similar changes so I set the software keyboard accordingly. En_GB and En_IN would both be fine, except for the currency symbols. I prefer En_IN because it gives me access to the Rupee symbol (₹).

Of course English India will be preferred if offered. I checked this on Windows that there is an option within firefox language preferences to set it to system settings. Anyways the En-In will be welcomed but is not a necessary condition though. We do just fine without it for now.

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