One thing the anglosphere really has going for it is the status of English as a lingua franca in the spheres of business, technology, engineering, and science. This could hardly be any more apparent than in the world of free software development, where code is written in English. Language keywords, function names, variables, interfaces, filenames, all in English. Issue report tickets and discussion, all in English. Documentation and strings, all in English, before using the English strings as a key to be translated into other languages. This is just one aspect of an enormous cultural hegemony which appears to be on the brink of being squandered.
Thing is, nothing stops people from outside the west from continuing to use English to collaborate with each other even if they don’t collaborate with the west.
One thing the anglosphere really has going for it is the status of English as a lingua franca in the spheres of business, technology, engineering, and science. This could hardly be any more apparent than in the world of free software development, where code is written in English. Language keywords, function names, variables, interfaces, filenames, all in English. Issue report tickets and discussion, all in English. Documentation and strings, all in English, before using the English strings as a key to be translated into other languages. This is just one aspect of an enormous cultural hegemony which appears to be on the brink of being squandered.
Thing is, nothing stops people from outside the west from continuing to use English to collaborate with each other even if they don’t collaborate with the west.
You just made me realize capitalists would create a language tax if it were possible.
Maybe that could be an interesting sci-fi concept
haha totally