Chad Perrin wrote:
- Most Americans live in a very, very large contiguous span of
English-speaking regions.
All of the official languages of the EU are indigenous to some country or region that is now a member of the EU.
English is indigenous to England, Spanish is indigenous to Spain, and French is indigenous to France. I find it amazing how easily and readily European-descendent Americans and Canadians forget this.
We have a Navajo Wikipedia. We have a Nahuatl Wikipedia, a Cree Wikipedia, an Inuktitut Wikipedia and a Cherokee Wikipedia. All of them are barely used and have barely even a single article, despite the fact that Nahuatl (for instance) is spoken by 1.3 million people.
The German Wikipedia is the second-largest, and yet, when I tell Germans about Wikipedia, they invariably assume that it is English-only, and they are very surprised when I tell them that a German Wikipedia exists. Now imagine this Navajo speaker happens upon this English-only news flash about the English Wikipedia, which doesn't even mention with a single word that Wikipedias in any other languages exist, must less Navajo. What are they going to think? You bet, they will assume it is English-only.
We have more than enough English-speaking contributors already. I think we - the interlingual community - have absolutely *every* right to voice our resentment over English-language media being nauseatingly anglo-centric.
Timwi