Isn’t it much more likely that the highly educated of those non-English speaking countries have learned English for scholarly reasons? If so, we’re looking, once again, at an artifact of geopolitical history—the part that resulted from English imperialist, capitalist, and Christianist oppression of the world’s people. A different historical trajectory might have seen this blog written in Mandarin Chinese, with all of the non-PRC visitors reading Mandarin Chinese as the scholarly lingua franca, instead of English.
Aside: you’ll recall, in post-Medieval Europe the scholarly lingua france was classical Latin, which put the Germanic language-speaking northern Europeans at a slight disadvantage as compared with the Italians, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. But, for a time—until England had its way with half the world—so-called western science was more linguistically egalitarian. Not so today.
The inference I draw from these numbers is quite simple. I can’t be otherwise than hugely gratified that so many gifted people from other countries and cultures choose to spend their time here at the Subversive Archaeologist. Either that, or I’m a sentimental, self-aggrandizing, descendant of English immigrants to North America. Never mind that. It’s ancient . . . er . . . Medieval history.
Thank you, all, for dropping by!
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