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> For who? UK users? Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
by zapzupnz 2y ago
> For who? UK users?
Literally every TikTok user from around the world? There's more than just the US, UK, and China, y'know.
- Retric 2y ago2/3 of the global population doesn’t speak English.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoTikTok content is mostly visual. My YouTube shorts are frequently foreign language with AI subtitles. Also, TikTok is banned in India and—ironically—China [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok
- Retric 2y agoA valid point, but I doubt people are going to notice if “clips of people slipping on ice” suddenly exclude Americans post 2024.
- yamazakiwi 2y agoThere will be a small category of content that will disappear. For instance, my fyp was full of Chinese fashion content (by choice) so I'm sure there are other categories of content that non-Americans consume that are American. Whether it's Movies or Music or whatever.
- shortrounddev2 2y agoAs their first language, perhaps
- Retric 2y agoThat’s at all, there are only ~380 million native English speakers. Of that 1/3 (of the global population) a significant percentage have extremely limited skills, though the threshold is above knowing a few random words.
- adriancr 2y ago> Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion wikipedia. You are a bit off... As for native you have US+UK+Canada+Australia+NZ+Ireland. So more then your 380M.
- Retric 2y ago~47 million Americans aren’t native English speakers having immigrated from a non English speaking country.
- adriancr 2y agoSource?
- Retric 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_immigration_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_immigration_stat...
- adriancr 2y ago> aren’t native English speakers Where does it state this? Do you assume that all immigrants are non-native english speakers?
- Retric 2y agoBy coming from different country their native language (IE what language they heard as infants) more closely resembles that country than America. Note I said 47 million and there are more than 47 million immigrants. There are also some native born Americans to immigrants who also don’t have English as their first language and People born in China whose first language is English, but that’s ever smaller refinements on a specific estimate.
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoThere are only about 400 million native English speakers. You can't just add up the population of English speaking countries, because that excludes immigrants living in these countries, and people born there who did not learn English as their first language. As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.
- whoistraitor 2y agoIMO first-or-not is moot. It’s estimated that around one billion people speak English to a reasonably fluent level. Included in that is many of the commonwealth countries in which English often holds second spot as a lingua franca (eg. India). It’s an incredibly global language.
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoI don't think anyone disputes that it is an incredibly global language. I certainly don't.
- permo-w 2y agothis is horseshit. Canada, the US and the UK alone have - minimum - 400 million. Australia has 25 million, Ireland 5, New Zealand 5, then there's the Anglophone African nations, plus a lot of the Carribbean. Nigeria on its own likely has 100 million native speakers of English
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoAs I've said, you can't just sum up populations. About 20% of the US population are immigrants. A lot of them won't speak English as their native language. Only about 60 million Nigerians speak English. Hausa is the most commonly spoken native language. Just because English is the official language doesn't mean that it's people's native language. I'm not just making stuff up. The 400 million number is from The Ethnologue, a source which linguists generally consider as reliable.
- lelanthran 2y agoThat doesn't sound accurate. Did you mean as a first language?
- Retric 2y ago> first language? 1/3 of the global population is at all, there’s only 380 million native English speakers. US, UK, Canada, Australia is where you find the bulk of native speakers. In say Germany or whatever they may become fluent but it’s relatively rare for German parents to be speaking English to each other in casual conversation next to an infant’s crib.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> there’s only 380 million native English speakers Not how a lingua franca works. There are 1.5 to 2 billion English speakers [1]. By far the largest number of people to speak a single language. Most of them are in America [2]. (If you count English learners, No. 2 is China [3].) [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today/article/two-thousand-million/68BFD87E5C867F7C3C47FD0749C7D417 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today/articl... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236986651_The_statistics_of_English_in_China https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236986651_The_stati...
- Retric 2y agoBeing fluent is a different question, you can dream in English without it being your native language. first language = A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_language
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoYes, we understand what a first language is. You should understand why that’s irrelevant to this discussion.
- gkbrk 2y agoEnglish is literally the most commonly spoken language in the world. No language in the world will fit your criteria if you want more than two thirds of the global population to speak it.
- Retric 2y agoWhy would that criteria matter when what we are discussing is the impact when you remove a country’s creators from a platform?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Why would that criteria matter when what we are discussing is the impact when you remove a country’s creators from a platform? That country’s creators belong to the largest native-speaking bloc of the most-commonly spoken language (native or not) in the world.
- Retric 2y agoActual numbers of English speakers already captured that info. Saying there’s no other language that comes close doesn’t change anything here.
- nfw2 2y agoI think they meant that because content is siloed already by language barriers, the only ecosystem that would be affected by the removal of US users is the English-speaking subsystem. That said, the English-speaking world clearly extends well beyond the US and English commonwealth countries nowadays. Also, a lot of videos don't have any dialogue and can also cross the language barrier.