6 Comments

The service of English as a democratic language seems to enable dysgenic linguistic practices and apparently has very few structural bulwarks against decline and pidgin-ification.

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A few comments:

1. The Wikipedia figure for Indonesia is likely incorrect; anecdotal evidence suggests that only around 10% of Indonesians can speak English.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-indonesians-speak-english-rod-pallister

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-in-Indonesia-speak-English

2. You may want to consider modifying your model to estimate the average IQ of each language's Internet users, not total speakers. For instance, I think it's unlikely that around 40% of French-language Internet users from top-5 countries are from D.R. Congo, as most people there are (and will remain) too poor to have Internet access. You may also want to consider adding more languages, such as Russian.

3. What you have suggested is already evident comparing English Wikipedia, which IMHO has a tendency to be inconsistent in quality, to include irrelevant details, and to have a noticeable pop-culture systemic bias, with German Wikipedia, which is professionally written, has minimal clutter and systemic bias, and consistently includes key information such as dates and places of birth and death, relevant literature, etc. Admittedly German-speakers are on average much higher in conscientiousness as well, so this effect is accentuated.

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The downside with German is that Deutschland has restrictive freedom of speech. It is harder to find radical content in German on normie platforms vs English.

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How can you take into account German but not the minorities in each German speaking country(immigrants)?

Also Russian is a bigger language than German. Would be intresting seeing about Russian.

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How many germs speak English

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It is a true shame that we switched off of Latin and Greek, and into English. English is a Frankenstein bastard language, Even quite into linguistics people like William Humboldt were recognizing that old IE languages like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit were the best and that language had essentially decayed over time and become worse for rational conversation.

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