4 ms·

English is no longer the language of the web

21 points by hermanywong 13y ago

diminoten 13y ago
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.?
- danbruc 13y ago
  Why do you expect that the dominant language on the web will be the same as the language the keywords of most programming are in?
- lcedp 13y ago
  Well, the accent in on the content, not on the means by which websites were created.
- agravier 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
  - mtts 13y ago
    As another data point, in the Netherlands, both variable names and comments are in (atrociously bad) English.
  - agravier 13y ago
    For the record, I meant *If not required otherwise.
- Dewie 13y ago
  The importance of what language the keywords of a programming language is miniscule compared to what language the majority of the code is written in (standard library and such). I mean, let's say, 20-60 keywords in a language... that vocabulary is tiny compared to all the variable-names that you're going to encounter in the actual code that uses that language. Besides, if the designers of the language actually would bother, then it seems easy for them to make the tokens/keywords of the language costumizable. Now I'm assuming that you actually meant the programming language itself, and not the programming language and all the code that eventually surrounds it. Anyway, this seems like saying that most taxi-drivers will speak German as long as the maintenance manual of the car that the mechanics use are written in German.
- T-R 13y ago
  As a data point, when I worked in Japan, most of the code was written in English (variable names included - the language was mostly Java or PHP), with heavy commenting in Japanese. Granted, this may have been swayed from the fact that they often worked with Indian developers, but also, a lot of technical language in Japanese is adopted from English. Popular languages there are the same as anywhere else - Ruby's creator is Japanese, and a high school student I know there was being subjected to COBOL. There is a Japanese programming language, Mind, which is a stack language written entirely in Japanese, though I don't think it ever gained popularity. It's kind of sad there hasn't been more exploration into this - there's a lot less impedance mismatch in going from Japanese (or Korean) to postfix than there is going from English to prefix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
  - lcedp 13y ago
    I find English much more suitable for naming programming "objects" then Cyrillic languages. I think it's due to the lack of case system, tendency to short wording and even ability to short these already short words further. I wonder would it be simple to name program "things" in Japanese?
lcedp 13y ago
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.
- nawitus 13y ago
  Esperanto wouldn't save any time. Actually, it would waste huge amounts of time, because billions of people would need to suddenly learn a new language.
  - lcedp 13y ago
    It's not how the world works. Billions will not wake up at the morning and start doing something new. But it's possible over time. For instance, in Europe place of lingva franca took Latin, then French, then German, then English. English just happen to be lucky to arise in time of globalization and the internet. I speak 3 languages and after trying Esperanto I saw that claims that it can be learned in 1/10th of time required to learn English (or 1/20th Chinese) are true. Seems irrational to me that majority of the population wanting to join the world community have to learn language 10 times harder with having little chance of being fluent in it.
- petercooper 13y ago
  As a geek, I would vote for Lojban instead because it's syntatically unambiguous ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
  - lcedp 13y ago
    Yes, it may be cool but it's not designed to be easy (for humans). Thus it's a very bad candidate for lingva franca.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  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.
lostnet 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Good point.
TempleOS 13y ago
The tongue of Angels. God says... abyss truths omnipotency goods crucifixion step surveyed doubtfulness hesitation sun-rising ever- disordered water besides tree bin scantling comfort wallow sigheth inebriation Enough Way knewest recurring gainsayer exacting mark I'm_the_boss shed consider juncture sixteenth caredst keen impair laxly encumbered Like Surely demanding delivers And head stretch incense effaces falsified Identification finite Blessedness instability formedst
Havoc 13y ago
>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.
- Havoc 13y ago
  I should perhaps add that I support English as a language & hope it prospers. Sure it lacks some of the nuances of German, but as far as getting your point across it is unmatched (based on my limited 3 language experience).
  - Dewie 13y ago
    > , but as far as getting your point across it is unmatched (based on my limited 3 language experience). Don't know if it is common for germans to know three or more languages, or if this is a humble-brag...
    - mlinksva 13y ago
      According to http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.p... 28% of Germans know German and at least two other languages well enough to have a conversation. Edit: I think actually 28% of Germans claim to know their native language and at least two other languages well enough to have a conversation (for some German is one of the other languages). In any case knowing 3 languages is pretty common in Germany.
      - Havoc 13y ago
        Yep - English is really strong over there among the younger generation. Don't expect any Shakespeare - but any young person will make an effort to help (in English) if approached. Thats for the native looking Germans - I can't say regarding those with a Turkish background. I'd assume its the same though. French is pretty strong too, but its seen as slightly more exotic whereas English is seen as a necessity/requirement for being "cool".
stretchwithme 13y ago
Happens to every medium.
- CyberFonic 13y ago
  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 13y ago
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
dfc 13y ago
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
CyberFonic 13y ago
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 13y ago
  > 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 13y ago
    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.

21 points by hermanywong 13y ago

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.?

danbruc 13y ago
Why do you expect that the dominant language on the web will be the same as the language the keywords of most programming are in?
lcedp 13y ago
Well, the accent in on the content, not on the means by which websites were created.
agravier 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
- mtts 13y ago
  As another data point, in the Netherlands, both variable names and comments are in (atrociously bad) English.
- agravier 13y ago
  For the record, I meant *If not required otherwise.
Dewie 13y ago
The importance of what language the keywords of a programming language is miniscule compared to what language the majority of the code is written in (standard library and such). I mean, let's say, 20-60 keywords in a language... that vocabulary is tiny compared to all the variable-names that you're going to encounter in the actual code that uses that language. Besides, if the designers of the language actually would bother, then it seems easy for them to make the tokens/keywords of the language costumizable. Now I'm assuming that you actually meant the programming language itself, and not the programming language and all the code that eventually surrounds it. Anyway, this seems like saying that most taxi-drivers will speak German as long as the maintenance manual of the car that the mechanics use are written in German.
T-R 13y ago
As a data point, when I worked in Japan, most of the code was written in English (variable names included - the language was mostly Java or PHP), with heavy commenting in Japanese. Granted, this may have been swayed from the fact that they often worked with Indian developers, but also, a lot of technical language in Japanese is adopted from English. Popular languages there are the same as anywhere else - Ruby's creator is Japanese, and a high school student I know there was being subjected to COBOL. There is a Japanese programming language, Mind, which is a stack language written entirely in Japanese, though I don't think it ever gained popularity. It's kind of sad there hasn't been more exploration into this - there's a lot less impedance mismatch in going from Japanese (or Korean) to postfix than there is going from English to prefix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_l...
- lcedp 13y ago
  I find English much more suitable for naming programming "objects" then Cyrillic languages. I think it's due to the lack of case system, tendency to short wording and even ability to short these already short words further. I wonder would it be simple to name program "things" in Japanese?

lcedp 13y ago

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.

nawitus 13y ago
Esperanto wouldn't save any time. Actually, it would waste huge amounts of time, because billions of people would need to suddenly learn a new language.
- lcedp 13y ago
  It's not how the world works. Billions will not wake up at the morning and start doing something new. But it's possible over time. For instance, in Europe place of lingva franca took Latin, then French, then German, then English. English just happen to be lucky to arise in time of globalization and the internet. I speak 3 languages and after trying Esperanto I saw that claims that it can be learned in 1/10th of time required to learn English (or 1/20th Chinese) are true. Seems irrational to me that majority of the population wanting to join the world community have to learn language 10 times harder with having little chance of being fluent in it.
petercooper 13y ago
As a geek, I would vote for Lojban instead because it's syntatically unambiguous ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
- lcedp 13y ago
  Yes, it may be cool but it's not designed to be easy (for humans). Thus it's a very bad candidate for lingva franca.
MichaelGG 13y ago
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.

lostnet 13y ago

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 13y ago
Good point.

TempleOS 13y ago

The tongue of Angels. God says... abyss truths omnipotency goods crucifixion step surveyed doubtfulness hesitation sun-rising ever- disordered water besides tree bin scantling comfort wallow sigheth inebriation Enough Way knewest recurring gainsayer exacting mark I'm_the_boss shed consider juncture sixteenth caredst keen impair laxly encumbered Like Surely demanding delivers And head stretch incense effaces falsified Identification finite Blessedness instability formedst

Havoc 13y ago

>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.

Havoc 13y ago
I should perhaps add that I support English as a language & hope it prospers. Sure it lacks some of the nuances of German, but as far as getting your point across it is unmatched (based on my limited 3 language experience).
- Dewie 13y ago
  > , but as far as getting your point across it is unmatched (based on my limited 3 language experience). Don't know if it is common for germans to know three or more languages, or if this is a humble-brag...
  - mlinksva 13y ago
    According to http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.p... 28% of Germans know German and at least two other languages well enough to have a conversation. Edit: I think actually 28% of Germans claim to know their native language and at least two other languages well enough to have a conversation (for some German is one of the other languages). In any case knowing 3 languages is pretty common in Germany.
    - Havoc 13y ago
      Yep - English is really strong over there among the younger generation. Don't expect any Shakespeare - but any young person will make an effort to help (in English) if approached. Thats for the native looking Germans - I can't say regarding those with a Turkish background. I'd assume its the same though. French is pretty strong too, but its seen as slightly more exotic whereas English is seen as a necessity/requirement for being "cool".

stretchwithme 13y ago

Happens to every medium.

CyberFonic 13y ago
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 13y ago

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

dfc 13y ago

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

CyberFonic 13y ago

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 13y ago
> 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 13y ago
  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.