Default Language
-
Your ‘Account Settings’ page (https://wordpress.com/me/account) has an ‘Interface language’ field which lists entries for ‘English’ under ‘Americas’ and ‘English (UK)’ under ‘Western Europe’. The so-called ‘English (UK)’ variant of English (including its minor derivatives) happens to be the one that is used by 76% of the world’s English-speaking population and is known as international English. If anything, this is the variant that should simply be labelled as ‘English’ and be the one that’s selected by default.
US English is used only by the remaining 24%. It is, in fact, a minority variant of English that isn’t used by anyone outside of the US. At the very least, the interface shouldn’t lie by making it seem like US English (masquerading as simply ‘English’) is the standard for the world when it is clearly not, and should be appropriately labelled as ‘English (US)’. Hence, the listing under ‘Popular languages’ should be the newly labelled international English locale, not the US English variant that is listed currently.
This is even more egregious when one goes to the actual WordPress site’s Admin settings and the language under Settings > General are listed as ‘en – English’ and ‘en-GB – English (UK)’. These should be ‘en – English’ (mapping to the UK English entry) and ‘en-US – English (US)’ as a variant.
-
-
Hi again,
I reached out to the team responsible and, while they’ll consider your feedback, I wanted to give you more details on the decision behind this. We currently have 14.7M users who use US or UK English as their interface language.
- 13.2M of those use US English, and 4.3M of them are in the USA,
- 1.5M of them use UK English, and 0.5M live in the UK.
Another reason US English is shown as the default is that a lot of software is being developed there and it has become an industry standard to default to US English and not even mention the US next to it.
Again, thanks for the feedback, and I hope that clarifies it a bit.
-
Thank you for the reply. Those statistics are not surprising, as those 13.2m people are not being told that it is US English, but that it is simply “English”. One would have to go out of their way to see if there are options other than “English” to see if there is a more suitable alternative, which is somewhat unlikely, as “English” is a label that would seem to suffice for any average user.
Furthermore, it is the default option, which is a very powerful technique in UI design to nudge someone towards choosing an option that requires active effort on the user’s part to deviate from the default. Of the 14.7m total users, 10.4m (~70%) live outside of the US where Commonwealth English (i.e., British English or any of its variants) is used, which matches up with my proportion estimates I gave originally. If the default was British English, then I’d bet the statistics would overwhelmingly favour British English in usage, as would be expected. The only difference would be that it would be the correct option for the majority of your English users as opposed to the current situation.
I understand a lot of software is made in the US, but products should be geared towards its user base, not its developer base. I can understand if a piece of software only offers one variant of a language to label it simply as “English”, but it is definitely not an industry standard to appropriate the generic label “English” to mean US English when multiple options are available; this doesn’t match ISO locale tag guidelines either. “English”, used generically, means international English (specifically, Oxford English), while any regional variant is meant to be qualified with a region code (en-US for US English, en-GB for UK English, etc.).
I hope your team addresses this issue, as it should be trivial to fix.
- The topic ‘Default Language’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 