[Ask Europe] People speaking languages with a small population on Lemmy, how do you deal with the dilemma of posting in English or in your other language? (jlai.lu)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by Servais@jlai.lu to c/yurop@lemm.ee

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Basically, that's it.

I'm a French speaker, so I try to participate mainly on the French speaking communities such as !forumlibre@jlai.lu, !rance@jlai.lu, !cineseries@jlai.lu, but the issue is that apart from the 2-3 top ones, the others are usually very quiet.

I know it's a chicken and egg problem (as you need content for people to come and participate), but for instance with movies, I'm always torn between posting the content in the French-speaking community, or the much larger !movies@lemm.ee, where I know that the audience is much bigger. Same for science, history, most topics actually.

I don't expect anyone to have a magical formula (the most obvious solution being just having more speakers of that language on Lemmy), but I was curious to see if other people in the same situation had insights to share.

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[-] sunaurus@lemm.ee 7 points 9 months ago

I think there are like <10 people on Lemmy who speak my native language 😅 I don't really mind just using English, though. I've always thought that languages are cool as a cultural thing, but as a pragmatic approach to day to day communication, I think it would be quite nice to just use a single language.

[-] Servais@jlai.lu 1 points 9 months ago

Hello, thank you for your work on Lemm.ee and your insight!

As an Estonian, do you think Estonian might disappear as a language as English would become more and more prevalent in the country? I know Latvia is a bit worried about this, Latvia has lost 13% of its population in the last 20 years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amqp2gU9634

[-] sunaurus@lemm.ee 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

All languages will eventually disappear, it's just a question of timescales, right? In any case, the timescale for Estonian to disappear is for sure longer than our lifetimes (barring some apocalypse scenarios).

I know many people are worried about Estonian disappearing some time in the future, but I'm not so sentimental about it personally. Maybe this is short-sighted, but I don't think cultural/historical/etc things need to be kept alive artificially - if such things are useful, they will stay alive on their own merit. If not, then we can always appreciate them through history books later on.