4 ms·
What would an EU hacker news look like? Would lingua franca would they use?
by JBlue42 9y ago
What would an EU hacker news look like? Would lingua franca would they use?
- iamthirsty 9y agoIn 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-claude-junckers-joke-anglophones-should-rest-easy-britain-leaving-eu-its https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21721861-despite-jean-...
- JBlue42 9y agoYes, exactly.
- girzel 9y agoNot 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.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoEnglish gets you pretty far outside of china. If there is one language you need to know as a tourist, English is it.
- dasil003 9y agoOnly half of South America speaks Spanish.
- baud147258 9y agoWhat does the other half speaks? Brasilian/Portuguese or something else?
- abrowne 9y agoYes, Portuguese. Population of South America: 421M¹ Population of Brazil: 208M² 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_America 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil
- barry-cotter 9y agoFor 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.
- microcolonel 9y ago> 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.
- JBlue42 9y agoI'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.
- unixhero 9y agoInteresting you think that. That is a broad underestimation of European command of the English language.
- yorwba 9y agoI 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.
- k__ 9y agoIn 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.