← Back to context

Comment by Retric

18 hours ago

2/3 of the global population doesn’t speak English.

TikTok content is mostly visual. My YouTube shorts are frequently foreign language with AI subtitles.

Also, TikTok is banned in India and—ironically—China [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_TikTok

  • A valid point, but I doubt people are going to notice if “clips of people slipping on ice” suddenly exclude Americans post 2024.

    • There will be a small category of content that will disappear. For instance, my fyp was full of Chinese fashion content (by choice) so I'm sure there are other categories of content that non-Americans consume that are American. Whether it's Movies or Music or whatever.

English is literally the most commonly spoken language in the world. No language in the world will fit your criteria if you want more than two thirds of the global population to speak it.

  • Why would that criteria matter when what we are discussing is the impact when you remove a country’s creators from a platform?

    • > Why would that criteria matter when what we are discussing is the impact when you remove a country’s creators from a platform?

      That country’s creators belong to the largest native-speaking bloc of the most-commonly spoken language (native or not) in the world.

      1 reply →

That doesn't sound accurate. Did you mean as a first language?

As their first language, perhaps

  • There are only about 400 million native English speakers. You can't just add up the population of English speaking countries, because that excludes immigrants living in these countries, and people born there who did not learn English as their first language.

    As for people who learned it later, even in Europe, only about 40% self-identify as being able to speak English. If you visit places like China or Indonesia, you'll soon notice that very few people know more than a few basic words in English once you leave the tourist areas.

    • IMO first-or-not is moot. It’s estimated that around one billion people speak English to a reasonably fluent level. Included in that is many of the commonwealth countries in which English often holds second spot as a lingua franca (eg. India). It’s an incredibly global language.

      1 reply →

    • this is horseshit. Canada, the US and the UK alone have - minimum - 400 million. Australia has 25 million, Ireland 5, New Zealand 5, then there's the Anglophone African nations, plus a lot of the Carribbean. Nigeria on its own likely has 100 million native speakers of English

      5 replies →

  • That’s at all, there are only ~380 million native English speakers.

    Of that 1/3 (of the global population) a significant percentage have extremely limited skills, though the threshold is above knowing a few random words.

    • > Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion

      wikipedia. You are a bit off...

      As for native you have US+UK+Canada+Australia+NZ+Ireland. So more then your 380M.

      15 replies →