China [1] and Brazil [2] feature strongly non-English developer communities. Regardless, keying such features to a language is just painfully ignorant. On a closer look though, it appears that beside the developer edition having the setting, the unbranded version will only be released for en-us.

ESR has some bits about "Learn English if you want to code" - but politics of it aside, this isn't even about coding. This is about using a plugin that someone has not signed (like, for instance, RES for Chrome which for the longest time did not have a Store entry iirc).

1. http://segmentfault.com/

2. http://pt.stackoverflow.com/

Wise words, kragen. With the excuse "you need english because" a new form of imperialism is on the making. And what is worse, is that this attitude is often self-imposed.

I think your are mixing “English, the lingua franca”, with “English, the language spoken in the US”.

Why would using the lingua franca that everyone agrees on be imperialism?

Because there is no such a thing like “English, the lingua franca”; changing the name do not change the content.

We should stop self-deluding ourselves in believing that English exits in a geopolitical void. English is the language of the anglosphere, and speaking English is a huge favor to those economies, and that comes with a sense of cultural inferiority as well, in many peoples.

There is a such thing as "English, the lingua franca" no matter how much one tries to will it away.

Aviation is a curious industry. English is commonly spoke between flight crews and ground stations world wide (with few but notable exceptions). Circumstances where the English meaning of a word wasn't well understood by the flight crew or the wrong words were spoken have, on occasion, lead to disaster--Avianca Flight 52 [1] comes to mind, among others.

I simply cannot agree that mutual intelligibility is bad simply on the merit that it somehow creates a "sense of cultural inferiority."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52

It sounds like you're saying that using English as the lingua franca of aviation puts at risk the lives of flight crews for whom English is not a native language, as well as their passengers. This seems like a good example of how English-as-lingua-franca gives special worldwide advantages to native English speakers.

Not at all.

What I'm suggesting is that having a standard for communication is less likely to put lives at risk. I can't help but wonder if you're invoking Poe's Law by advocating from what is arguably an extremely fringe standpoint.

Otherwise, the alternative would be to require air traffic controllers to learn a dozen languages, and then you wind up with an even worse problem than having everyone settle on a single language with codified standards.

Didn't the Browser Wars teach you anything? :)