If you look at all the outgoing links from English language blogs, only about 1.75% point to a non-English weblog. In the reverse direction, however, the figure is much higher. A full 7% of links from non-English-language weblogs point to an English site.
This means that non-English speakers, on average, link in to our community at four times the rate at which we link into the rest of the world. This is a kind of one-way mirror effect: because English dominates the Internet, we are less likely to to see anything outside our own community, while non-speakers will still be exposed to a lot of what goes on here. In the global conversation, we’re the ones standing at the microphone.
Ben Hammersley put me on to this one.
It is disturbing how insular American culture is. I think the assumption of power in everyone else speaking English is wrong: while it might make some feel smug over how the rest of the world follows our lead, don’t forget, they can talk amongst themselves and we have no idea what they’re saying. It might be no big deal — wait staff joking over the ignorance or unfashionable dress of their customers — but it could also be more meaningful, like the examples described in the linked article. If those storage facilities had blown up, the No Smoking sign would have been destroyed in the blast, and the convenient answer would have been sabotage or terrorism, rather than ignorance of the local language.
I wonder how many native speakers or translators Caesar employed during his imperium?