I use google analytics to track readers of my blogs. One thing that strikes me as extraordinary is the number of English speaking readers I have. More than 80% of the readers use a browser set to English language. About 70% are IP addresses in officially English speaking countries like Australia, Canada, UK and the USA. I have about as many readers in the UK as in Germany and France together, even though the UK has only 60 million inhabitants and Germany and France have 140 million together.
There may be many explanations for this, but one that is fairly obvious is that I write in English. As you may notice from some of my expressions, English is not my native language. I use it only to reach a large audience.
However, to a lot of people reading English is a real problem. If I had wanted to get a geographically even distribution of the readers, I would have to translate the blogs to French, German, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
English may be good to reach a wide audience, but it is not good enough to reach out to the world.
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