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Ah I see, these are just "official" languages. Otherwise probably the whole planet would be highlighted for English.


Highlighting proportions via color intensity would help.

But this information is buried deep down in Google and Facebook and is sometimes outright illegal to disseminate (like in French vs Dutch at the level of Belgian municipalities).

Before Cambridge Analytica scandal Facebook business accounts had access to numbers down to a few thousand with regards to the interface language.

I remember that some 80% of Ukrainians used Russian as interface language in their Facebook, and in Brussels, Dutch was on par with English.


Interface language != spoken language. If you are Ukrainian you might choose an interface in Russian or English for many reasons, familiarity, quality, etc. Maybe they don’t want to context-switch.

For most Ukrainians, Russian is (was?) a happy medium between being a language that they understand, and a language that is well supported in localizations.

I speak en-GB but I prefer an interface in en-US. Yet if you asked me to speak en-US with all its grammatical, lexical and phonological differences intact I would fail because my understanding is read-only.


en_GB vs en_US is largely a locale choice. Many developers in EU choose en_IE to have English translations, €, Monday 1st day of the week and comma as fractional separator.

Ukrainian vs Russian is a cultural choice. I sm sure that 80/20 ratio is old news by now, anyway.


And BTW French had recently been removed as an official language there.




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