What language do you speak best?
-
@rauschma clumping *all* of the other language into one category pretty much guarantees it's going to be the largest one!
@rauschma still, reality is apparently proving me wrong
-
It’d be very interesting to do a proper survey with a representative sample and an open set of languages!
@rauschma
It can allow more options, but I believe that that has to be enabled by the instance admin. -
@wfk True! I thought they were the same, but "first language" seems like an overall better/clearer term.
@rauschma for me, German is "second language" by a very thin margin...
Things get confusing when you are born in one country, grow up in another, live on a site with a third language in active use, your parents natively speak one language but have been using another on a daily basis for years.
It seems that many implicit assumptions of many (monolingual) native English speakers start falling apart at that point. -
What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated!@rauschma Dutch
-
It’s also remarkable how many people speak “Other”!
EDIT: I was trying to make a joke by pretending “Other” was a language. But that clearly didn’t work.
I expected the Fediverse to have many English & German speakers and had read that it was popular in France. I wanted to check these assumptions via a survey and my instance only lets me create four options. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to expect but the replies to my initial post show just how linguistically diverse the Fediverse is!
@rauschma supposedly the most spoken by first language are 1. Mandarin Chinese 2. Spanish 3. English ... and you missed the first two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
Edit: omitted the first two and included nos. 21 and 22. "Other" would get a lot more votes if poll-takers were representative of the global population.
-
What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated!@rauschma@fosstodon.org Chinese (Simplified Han Script) -
What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated!@rauschma I speak English as well as Swedish. Currently learning Haitian Creole at the moment.
-
@rauschma@fosstodon.org Chinese (Simplified Han Script)
@Orca
简体字。普通话，对吧？ -
What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated!@rauschma
Pascal -
@Orca
简体字。普通话，对吧？ -
@rauschma I speak English as well as Swedish. Currently learning Haitian Creole at the moment.
@its_not_lee Fascinating! It contains quite a bit of French, I assume?
-
What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated!@rauschma
Dutch -
@rauschma
Pascal@brouhaha Such a great language! I used it a lot in the 1980s. Also, Wirth’s “Compiler construction” book is a great introduction to grammars and parsing.
-
@rauschma supposedly the most spoken by first language are 1. Mandarin Chinese 2. Spanish 3. English ... and you missed the first two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
Edit: omitted the first two and included nos. 21 and 22. "Other" would get a lot more votes if poll-takers were representative of the global population.
@ghouston True! (As a silly joke, I pretended that “Other” is a language.)
Everything about this poll is indeed very unscientific (the sample etc.): https://fosstodon.org/@rauschma/117430069059928752
-
@brouhaha Such a great language! I used it a lot in the 1980s. Also, Wirth’s “Compiler construction” book is a great introduction to grammars and parsing.
@rauschma
I really like the Algol family of languages, including Pascal, Modula 3, and Ada.
These days most of my actual programming is in C++, C, and Python. -
@sjaakkeuvelaar I don't know if that person is a Klingon! I do know that some human children have been brought up as native speakers of Klingon. Who this person may or may not be one of.
@hengstenberg @rauschma@irina @sjaakkeuvelaar @hengstenberg @rauschma
To date, one reported case of a child being brought up to be a native speaker of Klingon. Failed, partly because insufficient pool of others to talk to, partly because the language is not yet developed enough to be used for daily tasks, and partly because the child (Alec Speers) simply refused to continue using the language once he reached about 5 years old.By comparison there are a few thousand native speakers of Esperanto.
-
It’d be very interesting to do a proper survey with a representative sample and an open set of languages!
I selected English only because it was the closest to my native tongue, which is Minnesotan. Not indigenous Minnesotan, but a variant of American English that is only spoken in Minnesota.
No one from Yorkshire would recognize my language as English; and while I would recognize Yorkshirese as English, I would not comprehend most of it.
-
@mdione Apologies for the silly joke: I’m pretending that “Other” is a language.
@rauschma ah, I can barely see the emoticon, I can't see what it is or what it's doing
-
@rauschma
I really like the Algol family of languages, including Pascal, Modula 3, and Ada.
These days most of my actual programming is in C++, C, and Python.@brouhaha Same here! I used Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon/F in the past (among other non-Algol languages). Now almost exclusively TypeScript.
-
What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated!@rauschma I like my instance, and the fediverse, because it is multilingual. I’m English-speaking, but I can read and speak French. I’m slowly learning German and a bit of Spanish, mostly by osmosis. When I retire, I’ll try learning one of the indigenous languages, probably Mohawk, from my area. Perhaps Chinese or Arabic if I’m around long enough.
