@elie What I’m interested in is which language people speak best. I’ll edit the post.

@elie True! Terminology is hard. When writing the post, I hadn’t considered all of the aspects of someone speaking a language: Is it the only language they speak? Is it their first language? Is it the language they speak best? Is it maybe not spoken at all (=sign language)? Etc.

@virtulis Random Other-related thought: I love trains and follow the Rail Baltica project with great interest. I hope Europe does much more with trains in the future—they are such a great way to travel.

@virtulis OK, good! Humor is so tricky, I especially in writing. There were also a few self-identified Otherians in the replies—which made me chuckle.

@noellabo Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

@grinka I recently took a quick look at Ukrainian and it looks really interesting! Well, there are seven cases (compared to German’s four cases) but the spelling seemed nicely phonetic (simpler than Russian, AFAICT).

@mdione For sure! It’s surprisingly difficult to do surveys well. (But even in failing, I always learn a lot. )

@anatudor Sarcasm? I was trying to make a joke by pretending that “Other” is a language (hence the emoji). It clearly didn’t work well. I’ll edit the post to either clarify or remove the joke.

It’s such a big planet, I’m constantly humbled by how little I know about it. I recently started to learn Chinese and at the same time got to know so much new history (dynasties, colonialism, Mao, etc.).

@DennisKuester Kann sein, dass sich das mittlerweile geändert hat, aber nach Musk bei Twitter war das Mastodon-Wachstum in Frankreich ziemlich groß. Ich habe aber leider keine guten Quellen dazu gefunden!

@vux55 同意！在德国，方言渐渐消失。比如：我和我的弟弟都说一个方言，但是我的弟弟的女儿不会。我很好奇未来全球的方言会变成什么样。

@griff I can fill in such a survey, but I can’t create it on my Mastodon instance.

@brouhaha Same here! I used Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon/F in the past (among other non-Algol languages). Now almost exclusively TypeScript.

@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.

@its_not_lee Fascinating! It contains quite a bit of French, I assume?

@Orca 简体字。普通话，对吧？

@fartnuggets Definitely a global language!

@ellohir Nice! I can see that poll but I can’t create such a poll myself.

@wfk True! I thought they were the same, but "first language" seems like an overall better/clearer term.

@resmo Bin immer wieder überrascht wie gut Schweizerdeutsch klingt und wie wenig ich verstehe! Deutsche Dialekte nehmen gefühlt stark ab (ich spreche auch Bayerisch), aber in der Schweiz ist ja sogar viel Fernsehen in Schweizerdeutsch.