In That's why I blog in English too, André talks about the reasons he blogs in English: International Recognition, Networking and Conversation. I would put my reasons in a single expression: Community of Interest.
When I started a blog, nearly two years ago, I thought long and hard about the language I was going to use. Logic told me I probably should be blogging in English, but I felt that would be a betrayal, a desertion from my language and my local community. So I followed my heart and wrote almost exclusively in Portuguese, hoping to discover fellow Portuguese bloggers with a shared interest.
Unfortunately, I eventually came to the conclusion that most people in the Portuguese blogosphere were not interested in what I had to say. That could very well be entirely my fault, of course, and possibly that won't change by moving to English. What's more difficult to ignore is that most of the blogs I read and would like to correspond with are written in English, and most of the stuff I quote is in English. It's not much use writing in Portuguese if you limit your potential audience to people who are at ease in both English and Portuguese.
I slowly came to the conclusion that virtual communities on the web are often more defined by common intellectual interest than by shared cultural background or language. Most blogs gravitate around a few chosen topics. Globally, these topics may be of potential interest to tens or hundreds of thousands of passionate people. When you confine yourself to the boundaries of a small or medium-size language, however, your potential community shrinks dramatically, possibly to a few hundreds who most likely are not even aware your blog exists, and likely never will be.
Of course Portuguese isn't such a small language, but if you restrict yourself to European Portuguese (pt-PT) it shrinks from 200 million to 10 million speakers. Usually Portuguese people don't enjoy reading Brazillian Portuguese (pt-BR). It's actually a bit weird, since written pt-BR is actually closer to written pt-PT than spoken pt-BR to spoken pt-PT, but most people in Portugal are at ease with spoken pt-BR due to frequent exposure to Brazillian television programs. Written pt-BR is close enough to written pt-PT to be emminently understandable, but different enough to jam the mental parser and seem like slightly incorrect pt-PT. When we move to technical matters, the communication barrier is worsened by the fact that a lot of English loan words are used, and Portuguese-speaking communities on both sides on the Atlantic often settle on a different set of words that are retained in the original English and another set of words that are translated, often in different ways. Thus "delete" becomes "deletar" in pt-BR and "apagar" in pt-PT, "file" translates to "arquivo" in pt-BR and "ficheiro" in pt-PT, etc...
Furthermore, it seems like the best and brightest tech bloggers naturally gravitate towards the English-speaking blogosphere, and for good reason too: it's very difficult to replicate the critical mass of the anglo-saxon blogosphere. The network effect means that the more people blog in English, the more attractive it becomes to blog in English.
Although I haven't written about it before, I decided a few months ago I would use the language that is most adequate for each topic. When I write about local politics and events in my geographical community, I use Portuguese. When I write about specialized or arcane stuff, I use the language with the widest reach, the language of my intellectual community. Right now that means English, but who knows, in a few decades maybe it'll be Mandarin (which I started learning around 6 months ago, but that's a subject for another post).
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