Introduction

This article features dead links. This is intentional.

I started blogging regularly slightly more than 20 years ago, on the now-defunct Italian blogging platform Il Cannocchiale. My first post is dated 2004-04-06.

Although I did experiment here and there both before and after opening my Cannocchiale blog (for example on LiveJournal) IlCannocchiale was my primary (I would go as far as saying “actual”) blogging platform for the best part of 6 years (my last post on that platform is dated 2010-01-02), before switching to the Wok after a nearly yearly hiatus.

My blogging on IlCannocchiale was essentially exclusively in Italian. The platform was Italian, aimed at Italians, and my social circle was mostly Italians, so —even if English comes quite naturally to me— blogging in Italian was natural and appropriate. In fact, although the primary reason for the existence of my LJ blog was to keep in contact with a few of my friends there (in a time when it was unthinkable to have cross-platform social interactions), it also served (briefly) as a means to escape the language constraint on my primary blog —although most of my English social interactions at the time happened on the alt.corel newsgroup, until my provider, like many other, started dropping support for Usenet.

Going multilingual

When I opened the Wok, I had a pretty clear idea that I would not allow myself to be bound to a specific language. While not going as far as believing that I would ever find the time to post new articles and their translations in multiple languages (something that supports through a po plugin), I had no doubts that I would finally feel free to post in whatever language I felt was more appropriate for any particular post.

When I started, the Wok content was also primarily if not entirely in Italian, although it did gain some minor pages in English right from the start. I haven't run any actual statistics, but I'm pretty sure that over time the ratio of Italian to English has been steadily shifting towards English, except for a couple of sections (mainly the blog-like Diaria and the more creative Oppure, but also the random Appunti).

So, what drives the language choice? In my case, it's mostly the expected audience.

I don't have particular pretenses of writing interesting things, but for more technical content, for example, I write on the assumption that what I'm writing may be helpful to someone who had a similar issue or wanted to tackle a similar problem or could be interested in a similar discovery. In this case, I resort mainly to English because —like it or not— it's the lingua franca for international communication. On the other hand, if I'm just brainstorming or telling about a fancy event in my life, I don't particular care about reaching an international audience, so Italian is fine.

There are of course exceptions. For example, in Mathesis there are articles proposing solutions to quizzes posed on an Italian blog, so I write the articles in Italian. Also, there's a lot of articles in Riflessioni that I believe would be of interest to a more general audience, and for which I've actually found myself wishing I had written them in English so that I could share the link in relevant international discussions.

For these, in general, the underlying reason for the choice is “what triggered the article” in the first place. If it was a discussion or other article I came across online, the article language will generally be the same as the one in triggering discussion or article. If OTOH it's a more spontaneous reflection, it's more likely to be in Italian, especially if it matured a bit in the Appunti section before moving to Riflessioni.

For what it's worth, I don't mind writing things in either language. And writing more “interesting” things in Italian gives me a warm feeling, because there's honestly a dearth of “interesting” things in Italian, so giving my contribution to this neglected part of the Internet is good, actually.

It's also to be noted that the main reason for this scarcity isn't that most interesting stuff is written by native English speakers, but because —like me— a lot of people who have the possibility to write interesting things in English will do so, again to reach a potentially wider audience (you lose the locals who don't speak/read English fluently enough, but you gain worldwide).

The nice solution to all this would be —of course— to provide translations of all articles that deserve it. But let's be honest here: who's got time for that?