Multilingualism in a global web

Riccardo is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival with a theme of multilingualism in a global web:

On the base of all this, I invite you to write about your experience with foreign/artificial languages; about the role of multilingualism in a predominantly English-speaking Web; about how your daily life is affected by multiple languages; and anything you come up with that can be interesting in this discussion.

I tried to brainstorm an interesting perspective or story or anecdote to write about but since I couldn’t figure out a good one, here’s some ramblings and thoughts on the topic.

My relationship with languages

Languages and how we grow to use them are fascinating topics. I learned three languages at school: Finnish, English and Swedish, and I’ve studied a bit of Italian, Czech, Dutch and Japanese on different times at my life but not enough of any of those to really be able to hold a conversation. I’d love to learn more though, especially Czech and Dutch have been in my interests lately.

I grew up in a Finnish speaking family, in a completely Finnish speaking area. Yet, now in my mid 30s, I haven’t worked a lot in Finnish speaking environments or companies. Most of my adult career in tech and communities have been working in English speaking environments and I’ve worked in US and Germany as well.

These days, I actually do a lot of my thinking in English and all my personal notes are in English as well. Partially because the topics are in areas of life where English is so dominant language: technology, gaming, entertainment and partially because it saves me from the awkward multilanguage mess that things would invariably become otherwise. It’s easier to embed a quote or example from source material to my notes if all of them are in the same language. Or to extract some insights from my notes into my writing.

Out of my best friends, about half are non-Finnish speaking so the choice of which languages I use in life includes English in all walks of life.

Languages of the global web and my blog

My blog, most of my social media usage, my talks and most of the events I organise online or offline are in English despite English not being my native language (that being Finnish). And there’s a real simple reason behind it: I have more international friends who don’t speak Finnish than I have Finnish friends who don’t speak English.

I interact mainly in the developer community where most of everything is in English in the first place: documentation, the code we write and the global community interactions. So especially in my context, English makes a lot of sense.

The translation tools in browsers are at such a good level these days though that I’m able to read website content in pretty much any language. It’s just that it’s so much harder to run into these non-English (and in my case, non-Finnish) sites or to grasp easily if they have stuff I’m interested in.

I do have blogs in my RSS reader in English, Swedish, Finnish, Czech, Slovenian, Polish, Spanish and German and for other than the first three, I use browser translation tools to help me through them. They are very specific blogs though because they are written by people that I know and whose stories and thoughts I want to specifically read.

I love that web gives us a space to write and publish in whatever language we choose to and how we can still read each others’ writing even if we don’t speak the language. Write in what ever language helps you communicate your thoughts the best.