The following is a post for the October 2024 installment of the Indieweb Carnival, hosted by zinricky. Their chosen theme is Multilingualism on a Global Web. One might reasonably assume that as a US citizen I wouldn't have much to say on this subject, but I'll have a go at it anyway. This post could thus be taken as me thinking out loud.
I could joke that, like Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) in The Fifth Element, I only speak two languages with any real fluency:
English, and bad English.
This isn't far off from the truth.
I have barely enough French to have gotten through a ten day visit to Paris with my wife on the occasion of her fortieth birthday; I can read French better than I can speak it, but I was able to ask for directions, order at restaurants, and even make a little polite conversation.
However, I got a lot of mileage out of rehearsed lines like, Pardonnez-moi, mais je ne parle pas Français bien
.
If you have even less French than I do, that means, "Forgive me, but I don't speak French well."
My German is far worse than my French; I have just enough to understand the lyrics to "Du Hast" by Rammstein, I know that "Sehnsucht" isn't a new cologne, and schadenfreude is one of my favorite emotions because despite my efforts to improve I'm still a bastard by birth and temperament alike. Though Spanish and Italian are, like French, Romance languages descended from Latin, my limited command of French doesn't give me much understanding of these other languages. Frankly, given that Spanish is the most commonly spoken language in the US after English, I might have been wiser to take Spanish in high school instead of French. However, William the Rat Bastard wasn't a Spaniard, and one could argue that one can't fully understand English without learning some French. Don't even ask about languages that don't use the standard Latin alphabet, like Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Tamil, Mandarin, Korean, or Japanese. I'm not even going to touch conlangs (constructed languages), either — because I can't even speak Quenya, let alone Esperanto or Toki Pona — except to say that the only conlangs that hold much interest for me are programming languages, since I get paid to learn and work with those.
If not for subtitles, there's a lot of media I'd be unable to enjoy because I don't understand the language, such as Korean dramas like Hotel del Luna, The Glory, and The Devil Judge. Likewise Godzilla Minus One; Toho didn't release a dubbed version in the US, and we were lucky to get a subtitled version. When playing games made by developers outside the US like Final Fantasy XIV or Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, I don't gripe if the English translation seems awkward; I'm lucky the developers bothered to localize the game for the North American market at all, and even a cursory look at Legends of Localization suggests that the localization of Japanese games for English-speaking players have come a long way over the last 30 years.
Hell, my "Western" culture wouldn't be what it is without translations. The Bible wasn't written in English. Popular depictions of Hell were inspired by Dante Alighieri, who composed his Commedia in Italian (well, Tuscan if you want to be pedantic). The Iliad and the Odyssey weren't composed in English, and neither was the Thousand and One Nights. You might have American kids watching Dragon Ball Z or reading the manga, but even the late Akira Toriyama's manga is a retelling of a classic Chinese novel — Journey to the West — and its hero Son Goku is based on Sun Wukong, the Monkey King and the self-styled Great Sage Equal to Heaven. Classic Hollywood epics like Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven are retellings of two of Akira Kurosawa's epics: The Hidden Fortress and Seven Samurai. The Shawshank Redemption is Stephen King's retelling of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, and Monsieur Dumas wasn't writing in English for a French newspaper serial. Fucking Beowulf wasn't composed in English as anybody speaks it today, and neither were the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oh, and King Arthur? Most of our stories about him and his merry crew come from Thomas Malory, whose Le Morte d'Arthur is a Middle English retelling of tales of chivalry that came mainly from French. Even little idioms like "tilting at windmills" aren't allusions to English literature, but to translations of works from other languages. My culture would be grossly impoverished if not for contact with other cultures, so I'd be a fool to insist that everybody speak my language when my language wouldn't be what it is if it didn't have the habit of mugging other languages and rifling their pockets for useful vocabulary.
My language skills might be a bit better than those of a stereotypical American, but they're still profoundly limited. This doesn't necessarily matter, however, because I have the advantage — or, if you like, the privilege, of having grown up speaking the lingua franca of the internet. What that means for me is that when I attempt to communicate with somebody outside the US, there's a reasonable chance that their command of my native language is far superior to my command of theirs. This is something I point out when they apologize for not being as fluent in English as they are in their mother tongue. Nevertheless, it may seem patronizing when I do so, so if somebody objects I apologize; it's not a worthwhile fight.
Never mind the web, incidentally.
Being a programmer I work with a lot of techies who grew up in India.
Whether they're citizens or not is none of my business; they're here to do a job and get paid, just like me.
Many of them expect me to give them shit for not speaking perfect English.
And sometime's it's tempting, but I remind myself that even if their English doesn't sound right to me, it's still a hell of lot better than my Hindi or Tamil.
If other people can be patient with
Furthermore, when you account for dialects, even English isn't monolithic. I generally speak and write US English, but if you're British, Australian, or Canadian you might notice that I occasional phrases from Commonwealth English like "have a go". You can blame Catherine for that; she's an Aussie and some of her English rubbed off on me. The upside is that I don't get pedantic when people spell 'gray' as 'grey' or 'color' as 'colour', let alone 'fetus' as 'foetus'. I also don't immediately assume somebody's being a misogynistic pig when they call somebody else a 'cunt' instead of an 'asshole' or 'arsehole', but I generally don't use 'cunt' myself because Catherine had told me that she doesn't like that word.
Even in the US there are still regional variations in how English is written and spoken. I'm a New Yorker; I grew up on Long Island, a couple of hours away from Manhattan by train. The English I grew up speaking isn't quite the same English that somebody who grew up in the South or the Midwest speaks, but it's close enough that I can understand that when a Southerner says "bless your heart", they generally mean, "go fuck yourself, asshole". As for Black English — or African-American Vernacular English — it's not the same English as the English I speak, but does that make it any less valid? I don't think so, but if I did that's something I should discuss with my ancestors; they shouldn't have been enslaving African people in the first place, dammit.
Getting back to the web, the fact that I mainly speak English and have little command of other languages means that I am limited to the Anglophone web. While there are surely substantial presences of other languages online, my limited at best understanding of these languages means that they are inaccessible to me without recourse to machine translation systems that may not provide accurate and idiomatic results. I think there's a paradox to be explored when it comes to machine translation. It isn't trustworthy, but if your command of a language is so weak that you can't do your own translations you've little choice but to trust the machine. Or, if you like: if you speak the language well enough to double-check the machine, do you even need the machine? The need for machine translation because of my poor language skills isn't a problem for me; the English-language internet created by human beings, rather than corporations or LLMs, is still large enough that it might take me 10,000 years to read all of it.
However, I did notice something interesting when I last used Mastodon. Mastodon has a couple of language settings: one for the interface language and one for the posting language. If you set your interface language to English without also setting your posting language, Mastodon will assume that you're posting in English. However, if you're not posting in English, Mastodon will still say that your post is in English.
This becomes a problem when you try to use Mastodon's language filters. When I was on Mastodon, I would generally set my filters to only show posts in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian; I can only really read English well, but I won't get better at the others without practice. (The same argument can be made for other languages, but my brain is stuck in 8-bit Extended ASCII; I haven't managed to upgrade my head to Unicode.) However, if somebody posting in Russian has their interface and posting languages set to English, their Russian-language post will be treated as English and show up in my feed. I don't blame them; I figure this is an unintended consequence arising from an otherwise sensible default setting.
If I seem to cope reasonably well with a multilingual Web, it because I have the privilege of having grown up speaking a language that, for historical reasons, has become a global language of business. It's also because I've tried to remember that there's an entire world outside of the USA, and that if I'm going to visit a country where people don't speak my language then being a good guest demands that I try to learn to speak some of their language. If I visited a space online where English wasn't the primary language, I would not insist that people use English for my sake; I'm still a guest in that virtual space no less than I was a guest in Paris, and whether online or offline the old proverb still rings true: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
You see, I'm not the center of the universe. My arse isn't massive enough to exert that sort of gravitational pull. So I have no business expecting the world to cater to me, in the respect of language, more than it already does.