Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Svip wrote:
I guess I am too busy maintaining my own wiki as well. Maybe a choice to attract editors would be similar to that of the Swedish and Norwegian wikis. That, and I'd like to see more appreciation of the Danish language from the Danes themselves. I hear Dutch is under the same criticism from the Dutch themselves.
This is interesting. My understanding is that even compared to the Danes, the Dutch are hugely internationally minded.
In Science Fiction fandom circles I have heard of an "8person rule of thumb" (though I admit the rule may hive more general application within Dutch society) - whereby within spoken communication situations, if there is one native English speaker present, there have to be at least 8Dutch speakers present, before even the most private comments by the Dutch speakers will be made in Dutch.
I can speak from a bit of personal experience here. Between the Dutch chapter, Jan-Bart, and people on the technical team like Mark and Roan, the Dutch were well represented at the meetings in Berlin in April. At one point I decided to invade a table full of Dutch speakers, maybe not eight but close to that number, partly just to see what would happen. (Personally, despite speaking both German and English, and Dutch occupying a linguistic space vaguely between the two, I can barely make out the occasional word in spoken Dutch, although I have a little bit more ability to comprehend it when reading.) Anyway, everyone was quite willing to switch over to English without any trouble, although some Dutch was still used occasionally for conversations I wasn't directly involved in.
For the English language, I think the underlying problem is a bit different. Often we native English speakers never really learn any other language, and by reason of not learning how things are framed in comparison, end up neglecting the quality of our own language, though we use it constantly.
--Michael Snow