Friedel en ander frappanthede

Today I had a look at Google's Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) for 2008 which gives an indication of which searches were popular in which countries. It was quite interesting to notice which countries have lots of searches in English even if English is not a big local language.

Most countries' entries are dominated by the names in Latin script of a few popular sites: Youtube, Facebook, Google, Hotmail, etc. The big exceptions that I see here is Russia and Korea, where the popular results are almost exclusively in the local script (Cyrillic and Korean, respectively). For China, the most popular searches are all in Latin script, but all the "fastest rising" seraches are in Chinese.

Poor support for a language would probably manifest in the Zeitgeist through popular searches rather being in English or French, for example. We can see for example that all the entries on the list for India is in Latin script. The competition among the local languages can of course also increase the dominance of English.

Limited literacy in a second language would probably manifest by few searches in Latin script. Here we can see Thailand, for example. It surprised me somewhat, since I got the impression that the script for Thai hasn't been supported for a long while yet in technology. Thai is written with 44 consonants and 15 vowels, and needs technology for Complex Text Layout on computers (in other words, the characters are not simply written next to each other like in Latin script).

As far as South Africa is concerned, there isn't much interesting in the area of language. Beeld increased in popularity in 2008.