loco-contacts Digest, Vol 46, Issue 4

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 06:17, Jan Claeys <lists at janc.be> wrote:
> Op woensdag 11-03-2009 om 11:28 uur [tijdzone -0400], schreef Simón
> Ruiz:
>> Re: a common language: It's not that the particular language is
>> somehow better, or that the other one is bad, or that we're ignorant,
>> elitist monoglots, or anything like that; it is simple more useful to
>> have one language per list.
>
> Actually, the ubuntu-be list allows 4 languages and at least 3 of them
> are used from time to time.

5 in Switzerland, even if we'd love to stick to English as lingua
franca. There are regular discussions about allowing other languages
than English on the list, but this mostly come from people who either
are not involved in the Swiss Team since a long time or are not in
Switzerland for enough time yet to understand the "Swiss Paradox" ;-)
FYI, there are 4 languages in Switzerland: German, French, Italian and
Romansh, and usually all Swiss of the younger (post 2nd world war)
generations handle at least two languages (English included). It
should be said also that the German spoken in Switzerland is not the
one spoken in Germany or Austria, but rather a variety of roughly 20
Alemannic and High Alemannic dialects, some of those being difficult
to understand by Swiss from other regions. Ditto for Italian and
Romansh, where the dialect varies between the regions, and there are
at least 5 different Romansh dialects with huge differences between
them.

We do not enforce the language strictly on the mailing list, but we do
so for the #ubuntu-ch channel. The latter is more used for general
team coordination, whereas the ML is addressing a broader public.

> Belgium has 3 official languages (Dutch, French, German) and we use
> English as some sort of "lingua franca".  I haven't seen any discussions
> in German yet (the German-speaking community being a really small
> minority), but the other 3 languages *are* used on our mailing list.
>
> I guess we Belgians are elitist polyglots then...   ;-)

No comment :-)

Regards, Myriam
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