English or Swedish?
I'm Finnish by birth, live in Sweden, but write this blog in English. Why?
A vast majority of the world's Internet servers run on old *nix variants and will choke on just about any character beyond ASCII in a URL. There's a reasonable chance that the Swedish vowels å, ä, and ö aren't displayed correctly in your browser, even if you happen to live in Sweden and use a localized browser and a ditto OS. And, of course, even Swedes seem to prefer English to their native language, judging from TV commercials, newspaper ads, and whatnot.
We can send people to space (yes, I know, we may not always get them back in one piece so there's stuff to be perfected there, too) but is all this really beyond us?
Then again, a potential readership of more than a quarter of a billion readers instead of a little less than nine million does have its advantages, too.
A vast majority of the world's Internet servers run on old *nix variants and will choke on just about any character beyond ASCII in a URL. There's a reasonable chance that the Swedish vowels å, ä, and ö aren't displayed correctly in your browser, even if you happen to live in Sweden and use a localized browser and a ditto OS. And, of course, even Swedes seem to prefer English to their native language, judging from TV commercials, newspaper ads, and whatnot.
We can send people to space (yes, I know, we may not always get them back in one piece so there's stuff to be perfected there, too) but is all this really beyond us?
Then again, a potential readership of more than a quarter of a billion readers instead of a little less than nine million does have its advantages, too.
posted by Ari N at 12:12 AM
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