[rasmafazi]

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. For interesting subjects, which always have global reach, the virtual conversations are conducted in English. There is also a place for vernacular -- it is part of people's cultural identity -- but not in a formal knowledge setting. English is a bit like Latin used to be: the language of knowledge, technology, and business. If the subject has global reach, you will miss out on the interesting bits of knowledge, simply because you are trying to do it in vernacular. Doing anything in vernacular, will just lock you up in a small and uninteresting national silo. Nothing of any interest is national. But yes, I use vernacular. I also speak it with my kids, but I don't read it -- unless it is poetry or literature -- and I don't use it in software or in business.

[marvin]

There are dozens of highly-functioning economies in the world that barely use English at all. I just got back from a holiday in France, which has its own fighter jets, nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers, yet only speaks English in jobs that are directly related to foreign communications. A random person you meet on the street will be very unlikely to understand you if you speak English to them.

It's a pipe dream to expect an average French person to enjoy art in its native language, and as a businessperson you will limit you market by doing this.

Granted, the English-speaking world is currently the world leader in technological capability and economic power, but it's quite myopic to assume that this makes everyone else irrelevant.

[jcranmer]

When most people play games, the goal is to relax. While I will concede that English has largely become the de facto language of trade, business, and technology, and I'm not going to go into hand-wringing because of that fact, demanding that people partake of their leisure in a language that's uncomfortable to them is several steps too far.

[eropple]

> unless it is poetry or literature

...So, art? Like games?

[microcolonel]

Sometimes I get i18n fatigue too. I think the world would be a better place if everyone's languages fit in ASCII.

That said, the cat's kinda out of the bag. UTF-8 is at least well-done, and the algorithms are widely available. I study Japanese and have started studying Russian and Chinese; I think maybe the best way to convince people to learn English is to walk the walk. Who knows, maybe everything will go very wrong again before we get a chance to standardize.

I'm also working on an engineered language with a test suite/corpus maintained alongside the language. Maybe in the ashes of the old new world there'll be room for something like this.

[Symbiote]

English doesn't even fit in ASCII.

To write it properly, we need left- and right-facing single and double quotes, diareses and accents for words like naïve, façade and café, en- and em-dashes and the ellipsis.

Longer documents will require symbols like † and ‡, bullets and §. The currency symbols £, €, ¢ and ₹ are used by countries where English is an official language.

[microcolonel]

I can't even use symbols like that anyhow (I deal in USD, CAD, and NTD). I end up using ISO 4217 codes everywhere. You missed ¥ as well, for which I would use JPY or CNY.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

And English speakers need to talk about things from non-English-speaking countries sometimes!

[douche]

Somedays, I dream of a world where the ancient chinese were exposed to alphabaeic scripts and decided that was a good idea, instead of sticking with characters.

[microcolonel]

Though honestly, I kinda like ideographic languages. If the symbols could be enumerated in a byte and leave space for delimiters and punctuation, then I'd be down to be globally colonized by an ideographic language. Really the only difficult ones (for computers) are abugidas, abjads, and whatever thai is written in (and I suppose it is a bit of a pain to compose hangul, and still more jamo than would fit in an ASCII-sized encoding).

[arnsholt]

Thai is an abuguida, descended from Brahmi just like most of the rest of the South and South-East Asian scripts. It's probably the one with the most additional stuff to consider, but fundamentally it's the same kind of script.

[nine_k]

One correction: consider Chinese. It's increasingly important, though less international.