What language do you speak best?
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@rauschma I had to check the definition of "native language". Conclusion: By the literal description as given by dictionary.com, German does qualify as that. However, given that it is also considered synonymous to "first language", I am not entirely sure what the actual intent of the dictionary editor was, as I would not consider it my first language...
Generally, the use of the terms "native language" and "first language" in English seems very fuzzy and ill-considered.@wfk True! I thought they were the same, but "first language" seems like an overall better/clearer term.
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What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated! -
@rauschma I think you can add as many as you want?
@ellohir Nice! I can see that poll but I can’t create such a poll myself.
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What language do you speak best? (Hypothesis: There are many French & German speakers in the Fediverse.)
Boosts appreciated!@rauschma Spanish here
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@rauschma typescript
@fartnuggets Definitely a global language!
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@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
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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
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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.
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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.
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@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?
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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.
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@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
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@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.
