Wikipedia Languages

I find this a little hard to believe. I've known many Welshmen and they all spoke English as their first language. And... at 16... he didn't have to go through British public schooling and use English there? It almost seems like they'd have to go really far out of their way to try and not use English (and I realize some do, just, didn't think it would be to such extremes). But, okay if you say so.

There are many Welsh-language schools in Wales, and the universities offer courses solely in Welsh. You could easily get by, even today, knowing only Welsh. Oh, and also, by public schooling, do you mean the state system (American public schools) or the private system (British public schools)?

The same way that you don't speak Aramaic but you can still know it's pointless to translate pages on Wikipedia into it.

There possibly are people who only speak Welsh but they are very, very rare. I feel like @kalbahamut didn't actually mean "British public schooling" (in Britain a public school and a private school are the same thing, and a school funded by the state is called a "state school"), and there are definitely state schools that speak Welsh. My cousin used to go to one. It is true to say that you really do have to go out of your way not to speak English in Wales, and quite a lot of people in Wales, if not most of them, don't speak Welsh (and obviously speak English). Also, it is important to realise that it is quite difficult to assess whether someone can speak a language in an objective way. It is possible that a 16-year-old whose English was "decidedly poor" might have, for example, been dyslexic. I'm not sure if I think it's pointless to translate these pages into Welsh. There's nothing wrong with translating a page into multiple languages people are fluent in.

Nothing wrong with it it just serves little purpose as far as I can tell. But people are free to do whatever they want. All actions have only as much meaning as we ascribe to them, no more, no less, as life is inherently meaningless anyway.

I'm still trying to understand Brandybuck's explanation of British schools. Are all British public schools private? (That makes no sense to me.) We have both public and private schools in the US, but no public private schools - or private public schools, or...I'm so confused. (I think Welsh is a cool language, by the way. At least the written language looks cool. I don't think I'd ever be able to speak it. The closest I ever came was a cousin named Llewellyn and who knows if we were even pronouncing his name correctly? We said it as, "Lew-well'-lynn")

In the UK schools funded by taxes that are run by the government are called state schools, and schools that parents pay for are called private schools. "Public school" in the UK is a term that originated before state schools existed, and I think it was supposed to be opposed to having private tutors to teach children in a specific rich family. The logic behind this is similar to how a swimming pool that anyone can use for a fee is called a public swimming pool even if it is a private business, while a swimming pool in somebody's garden is a private swimming pool. Nowadays the term "Public school" in the UK is most commonly used to refer to an old private school, so for example Eton College, Westminster School, Tonbridge School and Rugby School would all be considered Public Schools.

That seems pretty horrible. How can a school exist while not teaching the official language of the country. Sure welsh can be like an MFL or something but English should definitely be compulsory from day 1!

^ Welsh is the only language that has any official status in any part of the UK. And it can hardly be a MFL given it isn't foreign??

But "Bahasa" is usually applied to Bahasa Indonesian whereas "Malay" is usually applied to Bahasa Malaysian. It seems to me like Bahasa should be accepted.

the word 'Breton' is precisely a reference to the fact that the original Celtic speakers in Bretagne were emigrants/refugees from Britain. It doesn't mean the same as 'Briton' does now but it's technically the same word

Agree that given the debate regarding whether Serbo-Croatian is a single language or multiple languages the answer set should include EITHER Serbo-Croatian and accept Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, or Montenegrin as acceptable alternatives OR list Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian as separate answers and give credit for all 3 if you enter Serbo-Croatian. (I guess Montenegrin didn't make the cut). I disagree regarding Slovene and Macedonian, which are broadly accepted as separate languages (with Macedonian being more closely related to Bulgarian than to Serbo-Croatian)

Sure, the "Active Users" (registered users who have made at least one edit in the last thirty days):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

English 125k

German 18k

French > Spanish > Japanese

Russian 9k > Portuguese > Italian > Chinese > Persian

Polish 5k > Dutch > Ukrainian > Arabic > Hebrew > Turkish > Indonesian > Czech > Swedish > Korean 2k

Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Hindi, Esperanto, Afrikaans don't seem to fit at first glance

I wonder how many of these are poorly auto-translated pages, and paid groups or other organized efforts

✋ And a third person here slightly put out that "Serbo Croatian" gave me one of them but not the other (and so I didn't bother trying just "Croatian" on its own... guess which was the only one I missed?)

Spanish and Portuguese are mutually intelligible. If you go down that road, you'll have to add more yellow cells. Why not just make Serbo-Croatian a type-in for both languages?