The French invented the word chauvinism :) They take their language very seriously likewise. I work for a French company and even though the official language is English you're kind of a second rate citizen if you don't speak it. Or write last names in all caps or quotation marks like <<>> :) They just are that way :P
And if you ever work in any other countries, you would see the same in different language. Work in a Swiss company? Hope you enjoy German.
At one stage, French people has to stop this self deprecating and think elsewhere is much better and only French does this or that. It is not.
Not my experience in Swedish company. n=1. It's not just business. Initially I felt awkward in shops, asking directions, etc using English. People just drop into English seamlessly.
We're a Swiss company and we speak everything! English is the main language, but the engineers are mostly Eastern European but French-educated so they speak French. Some of the team is German/Czech/Polish, so they speak some German.
The common policy though is that if someone does not speak the language of the ongoing conversation in the room, everyone switches to English. A policy that I picked up from my Japanese internship days.
I don't know about Scottish-English and Irish-English, to be honest. Would an English native understand them?
Germans don't understand Swiss-German, and Swiss-Germans don't consider German as their mother tongue. Whereas the French being spoken on the French part of Switzerland is slightly different from the French from France, but people still consider that French is their mother tongue.
Not sure if that answers your question, or if you were just complaining about the fact that I made a difference between German and Swiss-German :-).
All caps started becoming more popular in English because a lot of people now have names where the first and last names are interchangeable and it was causing uncertainty.
I wouldn’t mind this becoming an international standard. Going back and forth between the west and Asia, no one is ever sure upon first look which is my given name and which is my surname because of it being written in a different order across different ID cards, registration forms, etc.
I suppose I wouldn't mind it either, so to speak. But I think you should just get assigned an ID number at birth. Ideally it would encode the place and time of your birth, parents' ID numbers and sibling count, what the weather was like when you were born and what was forecast, ...