A Portrait of Language Lovers

I would like to apologize for the length of time that passes between posts these last couple years, this is all on me, and I’m thrilled if you’re still around, following LATG on Facebook or Twitter, and otherwise giving me some sort of self validation.

I’ve been doing things, working, writing stuff for other people, staring at blank WordPress pages for hours on end, getting a new visa, getting a new job, getting a newer job, getting a newer visa, getting a German driver’s license, getting engaged, getting married, getting an even newer visa, guiltily ignoring your emails.

You know, life.

In any case, I’ve also done a lot of reading and soul-searching lately regarding where this website has been and where it’s headed. I’ve begun following a few other bloggers, many of whom have no real connection whatsoever to the language world, which I was previously kind of limiting myself to. Don’t worry – this is still a language blog, but I’m hoping to move in a different direction than the language learning articles and sterile 10 translation problems style listicles. 

While away, I discovered cool things that are tons of fun to play with and that I will definitely use far more than is necessary. ^{Things like this —–>} 1If you’re new here, welcome to your very first “digression box!” I use these as little places to, as implied, digress. I’ll throw mini-tantrums, explain little things in more detail, go off on unrelated tangents, or other things. You should click them when you see them, but not doing so won’t significantly detract from the article. If you’re reading this on a mobile device you’ll have to tap the square a second time to close the box. Desktop users can just click anywhere. I’ve at least attempted to improve my ability to be an entertaining writer and have committed to going more in the direction of amusement and authenticity than some of my older content might have.

Following my absence, however, I’d like to thank those of you who still care, and who still read. And what better way to do it than to introduce you to yourselves!

So let’s talk a little less about the tongues themselves and more about the type of people flapping them.

Who reads this, anyway?

I’ve done pretty well for myself over the past several years. I fairly recently passed the one million readers mark. I know that sounds like small beans to anyone with a huge website, but I’m pretty happy with it. I’m even more proud of my social media following, which is how this mess got started in the first place.

This success, as anyone who has been following LATG for a while has probably heard me mention by now, has landed me new jobs, a new start in Europe, and weird as it sounds, I met and married a long-time follower. So that’s pretty fancy and yes, I am proud of myself.

Anyway, having been doing this for about 6 years now, I’ve discovered some pretty interesting insights into you – the people who follow this site and its social media pages – and the kind of people who love languages.

For the intentions of this article I have chosen to equate “language lovers” with LATG fans under the assumption that LATG fans are – probably – kinda into languages and I think that a million readers and a total social media following of over 75,000 probably serves as a satisfactory sample size.

 

Super quick disclaimer; skip it if you already know what GDPR means:

To get all of this information, I use a few tools to collect certain figures, statistics, and demographic data so I can make the website better and sort of have a vague idea as to who I’m talking to.

In May 2018, the European Union passed an infuriating law requiring all sites that can be seen by Europeans – or more specifically, collect data of any kind – to have a cookie/privacy notice in place. You may have already clicked past mine at the bottom of the screen because they’re annoying and we all hate seeing them and believe me web hosts hate having them. In any case, if you want to read about how I collect and use your info in order to get these demographics I’m about to talk about, go here. I tried to make it funny.2It’s still not fun.

Otherwise, let’s get into it:

The ladies love me

It’s true. My largest demographic on both this site and the Facebook group, is women in their 20s and early 30s. Cool.

From my Facebook insights:3The 1% that is missing is due to these figures being more like 37.4 and 62.6, or another fraction like 38.2/61.8 or whatever. The system rounds down to 99% total because rounding both up in the event of a 0.5 situation would equal 101%, which isn’t a thing. Also, some people don’t list their gender information.

 

 

This gap is actually widening. At the beginning of 2017 it was more like 55%-45%. 

These figures shouldn’t actually come as surprising to anyone. Language lovers are diverse, but still something of a unique breed among the general linguistically-apathetic population.

While we may come from all over the world and from virtually every country (almost literally, as we’ll get to), we still have a few common traits. One of these tends to be an inclination towards education and self-betterment. Whether everyone here is university educated or not, has a PhD, is a high school dropout, or never had the chance to have very much real schooling at all – the overall value of education, whether it’s formal or informal, is something we can probably mostly agree on.

In the past couple decades the US, which makes up my largest readership, has experienced something of a paradigm shift in enrollment and academic performance demographics at institutions of higher education. Women are now in the majority when it comes to tertiary education, and on average tend to outperform their male peers academically. I’m not sure if this is equally true in other countries, but we are seeing an increase globally in the availability of educational opportunities for women and girls, especially in traditionally super-conservative countries, so I definitely assume it is. Tell me about your experiences with this in the comments.

The past several years have also seen a stunning rise in the number of young women hitting the road to travel the globe, Instagram accounts in hand, and almost as often as not – solo. Women all around the world are focusing on their careers more, earning higher degrees in greater numbers than men, and waiting later in life to have children – or just not bothering at all.

While certainly not the only reason, this last point is actually causing some interesting problems for a few of the world’s more progressive nations.

Japan and many countries in Europe, are actually experiencing an aging population coupled with a decrease in population growth. The CIA World Factbook lays it all out nicely by country. 

The Scandinavian countries are particularly of note here. Just watch how Denmark has been handling it:

 

 

 

Yes, Denmark is literally bribing people to go on vacation so they’ll dance the horizontal hokey-pokey. Gosh durn greedy wimin-folk wantin’ to be havin’ all these careers and stuff!4There are other issues at play than just women doing their thing. Many Western countries are also now dealing with a fun little issue of their own – men’s fertility – but we’ve dwelt on this enough.



Anyhow, it’s not like there are no men here either, in fact men actually seem to engage with the page more both here and on Facebook – leaving comments and criticisms, sharing, getting in touch, etc. Maybe men are just more willing to spray our digital essence all over everything we can find, or maybe we’re less concerned with public online image because it seems to have less impact on our lives, or maybe we’re the true language lovers and the women are all just fake Russian Tinder bots.

Guess we’ll never know.

Regardless, the men who follow LATG have pretty much the same interests, with a little bit more emphasis on tech and video games, which is pretty stereotypical at this point but it pretty much fits me too. The men also tend to fall within the same age range as the ladies.

Here’s another chart showing the overall visitor ages for this site (both men and women). It’s very similar to Facebook. However, notice that the sample size is only 47% of visitors. There could still be a ton of senior citizens skillfully masking their IPs with VPNs or operating in covert mode. Right?

 

And another one for the website’s male to female ratio: 

 

This one is a bit closer than Facebook, but still shows the women winning by a small margin. Perhaps this simply means that more women are active on Facebook and social media?5It does.

Anyway, if you were to throw all of my Facebook fans and website readers together into a big pot and boil them down into a single person…

…you’d be arrested by Interpol for genocide and sentenced to something awful.

But even though they’d be dead AF, that person would probably be a well educated mid to late 20s moderate-to-liberal who is6was* a globally minded, digital lady-nomad with an interest in wellness, travel photography, starting her own small businesses in something generic like content marketing, and not making babies yet (or whatever).7And yeah, I do realize that there are (one or two) conservative-minded individuals reading this and getting excited about leaving a “snowflake” message in the comments.

There is also a surprisingly high chance that she’s… Italian?

Italians love languages

The United States has by far the highest representation among language lovers who come here to read this site according to Google Analytics data. That really isn’t surprising considering it’s my home country, LATG began on Facebook years ago when the US still held a huge lead in Facebook usage over pretty much everyone else, and the fact that I write this site’s content in English and it’s a damn big chunk of land with a lot of English speaking people.

In fact, the UK, Canada and Australia all fall within the top 10. Italy comes in at 7 out of 10 on that list, with a still highly respectable piece of the pie.

Here’s this website’s visitor data from the last year or so:

 

 

However, among my Facebook followers, Italy comes in as a close second only a few hundred behind the US – an impressive feat for a country with one fifth the population. Proportionally speaking that’s shockingly large and I have no actual idea why. I never targeted my content specifically at Italians, I don’t speak Italian, nor do I post an awful lot of Italy related stuff. I’ve been there, but I didn’t meet any fans or recruit a personality-cult following. If website logic held, my Facebook page would be overflowing with Germans and Brits.

Instead, this is what we see on Facebook:

 

So your challenge, now, Italians, is to invite your friends and pass the US on this list.

Earth loves me

I have had visitors to this website from literally every country, most major “unrecognized states”, and all major territories except…

…the Vatican.

That’s right, the Holy See refuses to validate my existence, and it kinda stings a bit. I know they have a population of like twelve and I haven’t been to church since ever, and I may have said some inflammatory things in the past, but we can move past this, right? 

On the bright side, one of my lovely Italians can pay a visit then hit up latg.org on their phones and then yeah, I’ll have conquered the planet. Now on to the ISS!

Until just last year, I hadn’t had a single visit from Turkmenistan either. I later learned that this is due to them having the second most intense media and Internet censorship after the DPRK.8Former Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov at one point banned everything from video games to car radios and even closed all of the libraries in the country assuming that the entire population was illiterate. Niyazov was a seriously fucked up guy and a poorly known example of what happens when the leader of a country turns its people against the media and free press. You know where I’m going with this. Still impressive that one of you slipped through the cracks! I salute you.

You guys come from some pretty cool places – like Jersey (64 visits – their entire population), Guernsey (29 – also their entire population), and Gibraltar (30 – monkeys using stolen phones).9Gibraltar’s Barbary macaques are Europe’s only wild monkey population. They’re only “semi” wild though and coexist harmoniously with the people living there – more or less. They’ve become fearless and have even learned how to unzip purses and reach around inside for candy bars and stuff.

I have had visitors from Svalbard. I have had visitors from Antarctica 10Yes Klugscheißer, I know Svalbard is Norway and Antarctica is a continent. and even one from North Korea.

I’m serious.

And since it’s North Korea, you know the only people with Internet are part of the government, so that’s a little awkward. But hey, 안녕하세요, 북한!

 

Unsurprisingly this visit from North Korea provides zero demographic data. It doesn’t include the city, IP, the gender, interests, or any of the other stuff that Google Analytics analyzes. Spooky, but not shocking.

Not everyone is here to learn languages

When I set off in 2013 to write this thing in the first place my initial interest was primarily in linguistics and anthropology, specifically with regards to endangered languages and history, rather than on specifically learning languages myself. I got into the language learning game by attempting to assess the efficacy of various learning tools on the adult ESL students I was working with at the time. I was also fascinated by their own cultures and languages far more than I was in teaching mine – a horrible quality for a teacher to have.11I wasn’t really a teacher. I did the program coordination, took all the applications, and yes, sometimes filled in from time to time in the absence of the volunteer tutors, but mostly I was behind a desk. 

In any case, the majority of my articles turned out to be about language learning more than anything else. The truth of the matter is that this is what the people want and unfortunately its easy to be pigeonholed into a certain style or genre. Language products and learning are the “sex sells” equivalent of the linguistics world, and I was starting to make money (kinda).

A lot of readers are actually linguists and other professionals or hobbyists simply interested in other fun facts or stories about languages. While polls that I have run in the past suggest that most followers speak 2-3 languages, a considerable portion consider themselves to be monolingual and most have a passive interest in learning languages, or none at all.

I try to throw in some translation and linguistics related material when I can, though, and in the past several months have been making a big push towards linguistics, language history, wordy things, and just fun stuff I want to write about, because I’m getting tired of reviewing (mostly bad) learning products.

Following demographics, this is what the average LATG fan probably looks like:

So, we’ve established that the average LATG Facebook fan is a 27 year old white12Not necessarily, but as the vast, vast, vast majority of readers hail from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, I feel like the deck is stacked in that direction. My analytics tools don’t say anything about skin color, so it’s just a semi-educated guess woman who likes travel and photography, is working on a masters degree in something liberal-artsy, and likely speaks 3-4 languages.

The average website reader is an American or Brit who probably fits the exact same description. Between these two groups, can probably establish that the average LATG fan looks pretty much like:

 

This offensively stereotypical hipster

 

These way too happy people and their not very happy dog in this way too commonly used stock image.

 

 

This random Italian-looking girl that I found while searching for creative commons photos of Italian girls.13In retrospect, entrusting the Internet with the search term “Italian girls” was an eye-popping experience.

 

 

Not this guy so much.14Actually, as far as talking vanilla cupcakes are concerned he’s not half bad. Furthermore, Pope Frank is fluent in Spanish, Italian and Latin, naturally, but also speaks a bit of English and German. Mad props. He’s hardly unique though – most popes have had above-average linguistic prowess. I guess it comes with the territory. He was also a bouncer in his youth and holds a degree in chemistry. Badass.

 

Everyone has an opinion about German

I don’t know that German is the most commonly studied language among LATG readers for certain15I think it’s actually English and Spanish, just that whenever I publish content on Facebook that involves a language, it’s the German stuff that performs the best, that gets the most “likes”, and gets people riled up one way or another.

Memes about “der, die and das” never get old. Stating that German is ugly, or isn’t ugly, never ceases to bring out the lulz or the hate. When all else fails making fun of German keeps everyone on their toes.

Sorry Germany.

Some other demographic fun:

1. Despite the fact that the most common nationalities among my Facebook followers are the United States and Italy, when it comes to cities with the most followers, Italy’s Rome barely makes the list and no US cities even appear in the top 10. Seeing US English top British English was also somewhat surprising. If you recall from a few thousand words ago, The US is by far the most common origin for LATG’s Facebook followers, but British English tends to be taught and spoken more frequently worldwide.16That’s actually more complicated than I’m making it sound. I live in Germany where they kind of learn both. Traditionally, it has been British English that was usually taught in schools, but these days it all boils down to where a given English teacher studied abroad – which is increasingly the United States. Couple that with US-dominated media and entertainment and you get this bipolar mess of both Englishes. I have seen this weird blend of English insanity in many countries. I feel like this should give BrE a higher follower count.

If you use American English on Facebook and aren’t from the United States, leave a comment explaining your settings decision. I assume it’s because it’s some sort of “default” for new accounts and that you just never bothered to change it, but I’m still super curious to know!

 

 

However, language aside, the cities of origin that most frequently visit latg.org are much more in line with the languages spoken on Facebook. The contrast here is huge, and I’m not entirely sure why this is.

 

 

This is more in line with what I expect – New York and London may be the two most diverse cities on the planet – representing hundreds and hundreds of languages each, playing host to countless cultures and, of course, featuring prominently as places of learning and technology, which tends to correlate with people interested in languages. Not seeing NY on my Facebook list within the top 10 was really surprising.

London did make the cut. though.

Many of these figures look the way they do because I have at one time or another published a guest post that is particularly relevant to a specific region. The most striking example of this was in the case of Medellin in 2015 when I published this guest article about expressions that are strictly local to that region. That’s why Medellin is, to this day, still among the top 5 cities despite not being located in an English-speaking country, as the rest are.

 

2. You guys are super into Apple products. The largest single device used to access LATG is the iPhone – with the iPhone 6 being the favored model. After that comes Mac, then we have PC and Android, followed by all that other stuff nobody cares about. Way to absolutely perpetuate your hipster stereotype, guys.

3. You use Google Chrome the most – considerably more than Safari, at number 2, despite that contradicting point 2. I guess I get why, though. Chrome > everything.

 

4.  The 5 articles you visited the most this past year are:

• Babbel vs Rosetta Stone: Which One is Really Better?
• Characteristics of Indian English
• Johannes Goropius Becanus, False Etymology and the Garden of Eden

• How Not to be an Asshole to Your Foreign Language Teacher

• Is it Possible to be Accent-Free? A Guide to Sounding Native

But above all, you’re real people, not stock photos based on general statistics

While it’s convenient and fun to liken my readers and social media followers to the happy, smiling, dandelion blowing, beach resting, coffee sipping, globe hugging, summertime-scarf-wearing, avocado smoking hipster nerds you are, it’s not actually as accurate a portrayal as I’ve spent the last 3,600 words pretending it to be.

I went out to speak to you guys and collect your photos, and the truth is very clear that statistics are only half of the the equation when it comes to to me figuring out who you are. Those that responded are hardly reflective of what Facebook and Google Analytics tell me.

 

This is what the average LATG fan actually looks like:

 

 

 

Younger and older and more Asian and less-Italian – the pictures show a slightly more diverse portrait than I thought they would. 

As I stated in the beginning, I cannot say beyond a shadow of a doubt that these statistics are indicative of world-wide trends in the linguasphere, but based on the number of people who love languages following LATG, I have to assume it at least points us all in the right direction.

I want to make this image bigger – as big as I possibly can. There’s a lot of blank space there to fill so if you want to add yourself to this picture, please feel free to just send me an email at brian@latg.org, or reach out with a direct message on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. I’d be happy to have more faces!

Let’s do this!