Comment by teeuwen
6 days ago
I wonder why they decided to go with the specific language order that the messages appear in on the new page. First English is shown, which makes sense as it’s the most widely spoken language in the world. But then Arabic appears, which has far fewer speakers than e.g. Spanish or Mandarin. French and Russian are also shown before the Spanish message finally shows up. Perhaps I’m reading into the details too much, but this seems somewhat biased to me.
It reminds me of the “Hello” message that appears after (re-)installing iOS, which also cycles through different languages, but there the order is at least randomized iirc.
I think first one is user's/browser/OS language. First one appearing for me is Spanish.
It may be like how some country listings are implemented: United States / English first, then the rest alphabetically.
This is followed here: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish.
Seems to be an attempt to swap between Latin and other scripts, which if done intentionally, I can appreciate symmetry wise.
I think that it includes all the official languages of the UN [0], which is about as good as choice as any here.
[0]: https://www.un.org/
That explains the choice but not the order.
It does use the same order as the page you link to apart from English coming first, but where does that come from. It strikes me that it is alphabetic order in English if you call Mandarin Chinese.
Maybe stupid to point out on my part, but it HAS to be in a order. There's definitely a version of this that's just "the order we wrote it down" https://xkcd.com/221/
Though I think you're right that it's alphabetical by English name: Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish
I was sad about not including my language, but at least it comfort me.
The choice to include Russian is interesting, given the times.