Hm. For some reason, it never occurred to me to start writing this web log in Finnish, even though it is my native language, and the beautiful language spoken in my beloved country. Everything I have always written for the web is in English, and I often feel more creative in the English language anyway. Most of my reading these days is in English as well, as is quite a lot of my work environment.
However, the main reason is that a big part of my audience is non-Finnish. I am doing this weblog for many reasons, and one of the them is that I am also using it to tell people about the different projects I am working on. Thus it also functions as a development weblog, as well as a place to pour my thoughts in. Besides, if I wrote in Finnish, I would probably be writing a terrible English-Finnish mixture that nobody wants to read (aka "Hei, voiks tän spellin castata instanttina?")
Perhaps it might be more sensible to have a separate JSPWiki development weblog, but then again - I don't like to post to multiple weblogs. I also don't like the notion of categories, simply because writing is sometimes very hard to classify into clear-cut boxes - this thought goes there - that thought goes here. You read my weblog - you get it all. :-)
Here are some blog entries I have written on the subject as well.
21-Aug-2003:
Connectedness of Finnish blogs
I've mentioned this before, but the subject came up yesterday at the blog meeting.
I'm a Finn but I write this blog in English. That's fine, no worries, but it keeps me quite separate from the Finnish blog community. Obviously, since a big part of my readership seems to come from abroad, I cannot easily comment on the writings that my fellow Finnish bloggers produce - they would not be able to read the original articles! So I would have to recap the discussion in English, and that is just a bit too much to ask.
On the other hand, the Finnish blogosphere is rather small, about 400 blogs, and as such a lot of the discussions (such as the ubiquitous ATM discussion, or the "market value theory" -discussion - trust me, you don't want to know about these) tend to revolve around the same issues and the same people, which pretty easily makes them personal. And such conversations are probably better kept within the Finns anyway, and a lot of us don't read them either. In a way, I am relieved that I have this very good excuse not to take part in them.
However, there are also some very good writers, interesting opinions, and - sometimes - deep insights. Few of the foreign people can read these - but we can read all of the good stuff English-speaking people produce! Nyah, nyah!
I don't know if this is a real problem - it certainly is not a problem to Finnish bloggers; only perhaps to some who hang there, inbetween, like me. But it certainly makes me different; not quite fluent enough in English to write interestingly, but not really willing to write in Finnish either... Then again, it would be really boring if we all blogged in Finnish, because then our part of the blogosphere would be completely shut to the world. Now at least some people can get a bit of insight into what is happening here, even though the English of most writers is not perfect. It's all in the interest of world peace and understanding :-).
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| "Why Am I Writing In English" last changed on 22-Aug-2003 09:44:03 EEST by JanneJalkanen. |
