[wkat4242]

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

[palata]

> They take their language very seriously likewise. [...] second rate citizen if you don't speak it.

Try to not speak English in a US company, I guess?

[wkat4242]

I'm not based in France at all though!

[Foobar8568]

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.

[musiciangames]

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.

[bombolo]

And drop back to swedish without a care for the immigrant coworkerks :)

[sealeck]

Depends on the Swiss company – some speak French!

[fakedang]

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.

[palata]

And some speak Italian!

Small note though: I highly doubt they speak German... that would rather be Swiss-German.

[Glawen]

So in Scotland they speak Scottish-English? Irish-english in Ireland? What's your proficiency in these languages ?

[anakaine]

They need not be proficient to understand that Swiss German is distinctly different from German. Its reasonably common knowledge.

Swiss German is based around Alemannic dialects rendering it often and frequently unintelligible to traditional German speakers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German

[Glawen]

It is a dialect, written form is German. It is like hearing French spoken in sub Saharan Africa, it is hard to grasp but eventually you get it

[palata]

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 :-).

[walthamstow]

> Would an English native understand them?

Depends where in Scotland and how much they've had to drink.

On a serious note, words like ken, bairn, breekies, stramash are not that well understood by English people. But it's unlikely a Scot would use them when talking to an Englishman.

[Glawen]

I learnt German in Germany, and I understand the Swiss. When you are waiting 4h to cross the gottard tunnel, you have plenty of time to listen to the radio. It is hard to understand just like any dialect when you are not used to it, but I would not call it a different language.

It is very unlike a French hearing Italian even though it is the same Latin root and words look the same on paper, grammatically it is very different.

[bombolo]

germans can't understand swiss german.

[Glawen]

Pretty much doubt it.

[ekianjo]

Just like Quebecois is not really French

[palata]

Hmm, I would still say that Quebecois is French, but with some (maybe many) local words. Swiss-German is really a dialect (actually multiple dialects).

[Glawen]

So much this, try in Germany, you will eventually get ghosted if you don't make the effort of learning German.

[wkat4242]

I don't work in france though.

[pixelpoet]

Space before exclamation or question mark is basically 100% accurate indicator of Francophone writing.

[wging]

I don't think so. I've seen Indians do it too, though they may be more willing to drop it as they learn it's not done in the wider anglophone world.

[martin_a]

My father does that, but he's just bad with interpunction.

[Kuinox]

> Or write last names in all caps or quotation marks like <<>> :)

Things we don't do much anymore in France.

[wkat4242]

Oh really?? In our company it still happens a lot. Especially the all caps last names are standard. Even in many non french countries.

The quotation chevrons I've seen only in some people's output indeed.

[Sunspark]

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.

[eloisius]

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.

[qwery]

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, ...

[ehPReth]

no shouting everywhere please :(. maybe an underline?

[Glawen]

Caps are much easier to handle in database. All customers family names are stored in caps at my company (in France). It really avoids confusion when you call them

[JodieBenitez]

Only because most text editors suck.

[Glawen]

And half off the websites incorrectly treating é or è encoding, forcing you to omit these when writing your name.

It is incredible how badly foreign languages are supported

[benj111]

If I were to send a document overseas I would make sure to also include my native language.

A) because if there's confusion at my translation, it's possible for them to translate the original to make sense

B) if it goes to my local court, we can discuss what was said in my local language.

[erremerre]

Dont forget writing time with a h separator. We met at 15h45.