On Fri, Sep 05, 2025 at 07:37:46AM +0000, Adam Tazul wrote: > According to [0] and [1], less than two billion people speak English. > According to [2], we already have more than 8.2 billion people on Earth. > Granted, less than 70% of these actually have access to the internet [3], and > only 3.93% of those on a desktop/laptop are using some form of Linux[4], but > I think it's a question worth asking regardless. > > [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world > [1]: > https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-english-and-where-is-it-spoken > [2]: https://www.worldometers.info > [3]: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users > [4]: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
It's worth noting that from statistics compiled as a percentage of the global population it makes sense to focus on English since, when combining its use as a first and additional language about 25% of the world population speaks it.[0] Furthermore, I'd be very surprised if the percentage of Linux users specifically who know English were not *much* higher, as it is practically the default language used in tech spaces. Compare this to Spanish which only has about “600 million speakers total, including second-language speakers.”[1] If your objective is to write in a language which can be read by as large and diverse a demography as possible, English is evidently the best match. This is not, of course, to discourage work from being done to translate pages into other languages or add other such multilingual support. I simply thought it was worth putting into perspective that this isn't a major issue where perhaps billions of people are being excluded by not having pages in languages other than English. It'd be a nice addition, though. The question, however, would be what policy is established regarding language use. Particularly whether it should be allowed for there to be pages and (more importantly to the subject of this thread) AUR packages that do *not* have an English translation. The problem I would propose in this regard being that of moderation: the ArchLinux project would then require dedicated moderators for the AUR who are fluent in these languages to be able to properly moderate them. Another option is for the ArchLinux team to add a list of “supported languages.” Regards, Nicolás Ortega [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language -- Nicolás Ortega Froysa https://themusicinnoise.net/ Public PGP Key: https://themusicinnoise.net/[email protected]_pub.asc
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