Henrique is forcing me into participating in this collective blogging event called the "IndieWeb Carnival", this time hosted by ZinRicky. This month's topic is "Multilingualism in a Global Web", but I'll just write a bit about my own use of different languages on this site and on social media.

Let's start with the languages I speak. I am native Dutch and I am fairly fluent in English. I also understand some Japanese as I have been self studying on and off for over 15 years now. According to my middle school diploma I also know French and German, and I indeed proved to be able to have some basic conversations in Essen this weekend, but my French is really a withered plant at the moment. I did a Swedish course for beginners around 2011 and even though I still know some words, sentences and intonations, I have just removed it from my LinkedIn profile because a recruiter reached out to me regarding a Swedish speaking job offer I am neither interested in nor qualified for. I also have Duolingo "my cat is an apple" proficiency in Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian. On parties without too many language nerds I dare to say "name any language and I'll know a fact about it," because this is true for most languages normal people would mention.

Then about this blog: I started writing exclusively in Dutch, as that is my native language. When I "joined" the IndieWeb, I started writing posts that were relevant to an IndieWeb audience in English, as I knew only one person on the IndieWeb who understood Dutch at the time. Since I broke my foot 9 weeks ago, I started weekly notes and somehow I started those in English (probably mostly because the week notes I read in my RSS reader are all in English too, so it felt part of the genre.)

Thus, previously I had the distinction "IndieWeb is English, rest is Dutch", then it moved to "personal is Dutch, rest is English", but now I also gone away with that. I guess it's now just "however I feel like it". There is also the thing that I care less about the audience for my Dutch posts, so maybe I write English for others and Dutch for myself?

As for social media: I have separate Dutch and English Twitter accounts, both being inactive due to someone buying the platform. I also have a "Seb leert Zweeds" account, on which I posted short and badly written Swedish tweets back in the day. The Twitter distinction of Dutch and English was also: Dutch for random thoughts, personal stuff, English for being professional, following mostly web developers and tech accounts.

I don't know exactly what to say about multilingualism on the bigger web. I read whatever I can read, which comes down to both Dutch and English (Japanese is already too hard to read if it's not on NHK News Web Easy). I sometimes write my posts in Dutch with the idea that people who are interested will use a translator app, but I am also aware that I never really do that when I read myself.

I do mark all my posts with a language, so that they show up in the proper feeds. People can therefore subscribe to only my English posts and skip the Dutch. This would've made more sense if I was more strict about the topic within each language, I assume, but hey I am not writing this for money... this is a personal blog.