[rglullis]

It's a mix of market demand and potential. China has all the clones, so Mandarin-speaking people already have their Q/A equivalent.

India (mostly) speaks english at a level that allows them to participate in the "original" Stackoverflow.

Arabic? As much as there is a big population, I would venture that there is not enough demand.

Brazil, OTOH, is a reasonably industrialized country with some industries that are quite advanced: Genomics and Banking come to mind. It has the 3rd or 4th largest telecommunications infrastructure in the world. Put that together with the fact they can't speak English that well and you have a big under-served audience.

Though the cynic in me thinks that this is just a way to contain the pesky Brazilians, who are known for not being exactly civil in online communities. By letting the less educated Brazilians have their own yard, they won't do as much damage to the main property.

Ps: shout out to Gabriel (Gabe). He worked with us for a year or so and it was a pleasure to have him on the team. Great guy, super smart and zero ego.

[marcosdumay]

Is Arabic even a single language? (I really don't know.)

But I don't think it's in the SO best interest to contain any group. They already have a moderation system for dealing with anoying people. I'd put that cinic at rest.

What this will achieve is making learning to program much easier for portugueese speaking people. A much needed thing. But I doubt that anybody will stop searching problems in english, just the sheer number and selection bias are enough to keep the best content in english.

Anyway, great icon. Stack Overflow with cedilha!

[mchaver]

Written Arabic can be considered one language. Spoken varieties are not mutually intelligible and do not generally have standardized written forms, though many Arabic speakers can understand Egyptian Arabic do to popularity of their media.

[friendzis]

This is appalling, but sometimes in my work I can better express myself in English than in my mother tongue. It's not because there is much more material in English, but because there is so much high quality material in English. With this we are basically encouraging removal of high quality material from the web. Remeber: the internets are english and there are no girls on the internet :D

[ionforce]

How is this a removal of content?

[friendzis]

In a sense that content creation capacity is limited. Especially quality content. Driving some creators (and consequently content) to private zones of internets make that content inaccessible which is indistinguishable from removal

[tbastos]

LOL as a Brazilian, that was my first thought too! The most skilled developers will continue to use the global SO and only the "pesky" will move to the new site. The only real drawback is for the youth who doesn't speak english well yet, and now has one more incentive to never really learn it.

[bederoso]

Exactly what I thought as well, [as a Brazilian myself] I predict this PT-SO will be filled with "easy" questions easily answered by a search, and should have a very low level of actual good content. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, I tried participating in multiple Brazilian programming communities, but it's always the same beginner-level-you-could-have-figured-it-out-yourself type of questions.

As for the youth that doesn't speak English well yet, I suppose they could see the low quality that this PT-SO would be as an incentive to actually start learning it :-)

[lgama]

Prediction fulfilled so far.

[tricolon]

What about French or Spanish?

[rglullis]

They would be good candidates. But look at the numbers of Internet usage in Brazil. It makes perfect sense to have Portuguese as the first. It doesn't mean that it will be the only one.