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Discussion on: Browser API's localization: why can't you do this, Chrome?

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

I'm still curious though why Chrome's team made such a decision to include not all the languages?

Well, to start with there's no point in including all the languages. There are over 7000 natural languages attested throughout the world. Based on data from Ethonlogue (one of the major linguistics authorities), only 21 of those languages are spoken at native or second language proficiency by more than 1% of the world population. In descending order by total speakers: English (wins out over Mandarin because of L2 speakers), Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French, Standard Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Urdu, German, Japanese, Swahili, Marathi, Telugu, Western Punjabi, Wu Chinese, Tamil, Turkish, and Korean. You'll notice that that list of 21 languages, with the exception of Wu Chinese, comprises most of a standard list of supported languages for software that's considered to be very well internationalized. Most of the others you're likely to see on such a list (such as Vietnamese, Thai, Italian or Swedish) are still within 0.1% of the world population in terms of total speakers.

Once you get past a certain point, the language becomes such a minority item that it's not unreasonable to expect people who speak it to be fluent in at least one other language that is spoken by a significantly larger percentage of the world population, and therefore you can realistically assume that they'll be able to use your software in that language instead of their native language. For example, pretty much nobody who speaks Maori these days doesn't also speak at least one other language (usually English) at at least a basic level of proficiency.

And will the missing languages be included in the future?

Probably not would be my guess, at least not unless they suddenly surge in popularity. Armenian is only a little short of that 0.1% mark (roughly 0.087%), but most people who speak the language and would be likely to use Chrome are also diglots or triglots and speak at least one other language that's significantly more widely used (fun fact, a very large percentage of native speakers of Armenian aren't actually in Armenia), so it's not likely to get picked up. Basque (the next most spoken out of the other languages I listed in my first post) is even worse off at less than even 0.0001% with pretty much everybody who speaks the language also speaking either Spanish or French with at least second-language fluency, so it's even less likely that it will be included.