English (was Re: A few hums)

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

On donderdag, jul 24, 2003, at 17:10 Europe/Amsterdam, Cyrus Shaoul 
wrote:

> In rejoining the thread, I wanted to note that there are parts of the
> world that have much less exposure to American English as compared to
> the Netherlands or other countries in Western Europe.

The fact that movies and tv are subtitled and not dubbed here in NL 
seems to make a difference as well. This certainly explains why my 
English has improved since high school while my German has only gotten 
worse, as I found out last week...

But I can't imagine being involved in one of the areas of interest of 
the IETF and not at least reading a lot of English.

> I talked to a
> small number of people from India, Korea, China and Japan at the last
> IETF meeting in Vienna (about 10 people), and they all told me that 
> they
> felt left out and frustrated at some of the WG meetings.

Do you mean that there are also people who don't feel frustrated and 
left out during wg meetings, not counting the inner circle with 25 IETF 
meetings down their belts?

Did they tell you why they feel this way?

> I don't think the situation is black-or-white with the all the European
> participants either. There may be a significant minority of European
> attendees who would have a much better understanding of what is going 
> on
> if speakers spoke slower and more clearly, in plainer language.

I don't think speaking slow in itself is of much value. It's just that 
many people try to speak too fast for reasons I can only imagine and 
this tends to get in the way of clear articulation. This is especially 
problematic if the speaker diverts from "generic" (American?) English.

> I do agree with you that we need more information about the scale of 
> the
> problem before deciding whether or not it is significant enought to act
> on. I have lots of anecdotal evidence, but no hard data. I would love
> to know how many people have already stopped attending IETF meetings
> because of this problem. Unfortunately, it is hard to find out from
> within the IETF who is no longer involved in the IETF, but we could 
> send
> out a survey to all non-native English speakers currently subscribed to
> all WG mailing lists (should this be done?).

Why not contact people who used to come to the IETF meetings but don't 
anymore?

> How large a number of
> people complaining would you say would be needed to justify action? 100
> people? More? Less?

I'd say that if less than 10% of all people who respond didn't stop 
coming because of language-related problems there is no reason to do 
anything. Above 35% we absolutely need to do something.