Brazil and USA in unseemly Web squabble

Found on The Inquirer on Monday, 19 July 2004
Browse Internet

A row brewing on Google's Orkut communities about an invasion of Brazilians.

According to Reuters, the social networking site is apparently getting a little too full of people speaking Portuguese, which is what human beings speak in Brazil.

When a Canadian posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English, the Brazilians dubbed her a xenophobe.

Some whinge that when the average Orkut user goes to look at community listings they will see a list populated with pretty much all Portuguese communities. He finds this frustrating since he thinks Orkut is not a Brazilian service.

In fact this is not quite true. According to Orkut, Brazilians dominate its membership roster and outnumber Americans. The site says it has more than 769,000 members, making it one of the largest on the Internet. About 23.5 per cent of the users are from the United States, while another 41.2 per cent are Brazilians. Americans are in a minority.

Welcome to the wonderful multi-lingual world. Some people expect that everyone speaks English because it is so common. Well, about 3 times as many people speak Mandarin. The amount of english speakers is pretty close to those who speak Hindi or Spanish as their first language.