Internet in western countries really is creating some kind of English-centered shockwave.
It's true (to a much lesser extent) in other languages. Japanese internet slang[2] is still very Japanese but has stuff directly borrowed or adapted from English for a lot of new tech.
I'm getting into sci-fi territory now, but I think the Belta Creole[3] of "The Expanse" shows a cool futuristic take on a blend of languages where English still has the bulk of the real estate.
[1] https://www.francaisfacile.com/exercices/exercice-francais-2...
[2] https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slan...
Portuguese is full of those, and it's a major source of resistance on changing the language in Brazil. (Although Brazilian resistance may look like plain acceptance from French standards.)
vers, verre, vert.
mer, mère, maire.
In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.
The only “important” accented letter is “é”. In most cases “è” is completely redundant as it follows the rule that if the next vowel is a silent “e” then the current “e” takes the \ε\ sound. “Ê” makes the same sound but is there for historical reasons. We can determine if we need an open “e” sound by applying like 2 rules (the aforementioned one and e followed by two consonants is always open) and by memorising some of the multigraphs which are part of the phonetics as it is.
Removing “é” makes it harder to determine pronunciation and makes it easier to confuse tenses, eg “il a mange”, if you’re reading you might “a” and misunderstand the tense (he ate vs he eats). There aren’t any consistent rules for the use of “é” apart from the start of a word.
Personally speaking, I rely on “é” a lot more than I do on “è” and I’ve been tripped up by a missing ’ on “e” many times unlike the other one.
la porte vs. il a porté
etc.
there are definitely words in French, where the accent makes a difference in pronunciation. there are also some cases where there are meaning differences, even when the words are pronounced the same e.g. du vs. dû.
Now it's usually not a problem, as ambiguity in general is rarely a problem in language due to context.
I guess I proved your point to some extent: I care less about accent errors than other mistakes, and just consider it a typo. But reading a completely unaccented text is hard for me, and I text, e-mail, and communicate online a lot.
In my experience, people are not foregoing them on purpose, except on capital letters, which is an heritage of AZERTY keyboards + windows (hopefully AFNOR keyboards catches on). Capital accented letters is the example to cite if you want an example of computer technology changing our habits: my friend Etienne (Étienne?) insists there is no accent on hist first name, but it makes no sense to me.
The point was simply that accents in French can change pronunciation, or at least change the meaning even if the pronunciation remains the same.
il est content (= he's happy)
ils content (= they are telling a story)
... so one less accent doesn't hurt that much :)
In my view this is partly because of the 'focus' (or lack thereof) of the education system and partly because most software is developed in English first with the addition of accents an add-on, which makes typing accents cumbersome and thus the path of least resistance is to give up, especially when writing casually.
As of right now I'm on a mac and I feel very comfortable with the way they've designed input for "roman accented" letters (using the option key, or for some using long presses) but it's a whole other thing once I see a Windows computer.
You can use QWERTY with accents very easily with "International keyboard with dead keys"[1]. You can configure OS to switch keyboard with Alt+Shift to have the regular QWERTY and the International-QWERTY when you need it.
[1] https://web.cortland.edu/ponterior/keyboard/#:~:text=The%20U....
I'll keep it in mind if I end up making myself a desktop PC in the future. But I guess the hardest part about any good alternative design isn't so much the design itself but its adoption and how often you're interacting with it to rewire your brain.
In “typewriter” English which is dominant because of, first, typewriters and then ASCII and then keyboards and then familiarity (as unicode and mobile keyboard usually support additional characters easily), that's true of almost all punctuation. In typeset English (which Unicode in principle supports), it's true of somewhat less punctuation.
Perhaps the software culture has also changed. When people were mostly typing "seriously" in Word or email all the correct typography was implemented. For example Word selects the correct quotation marks automatically based on locale.
Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. do not care. Just ship fast.
Indeed tech is not made in a local-friendly way normally - for example, losing those symbols is a direct consequence of the fact that they are usually buried with other rarely used symbols. But for cases like punctuation, I don't really mind it. It might just be me but I've never cared about " vs » and I'm happy to have an international standard to make things easier. diacritics are more important (n vs ñ, o vs ó) but those are usually far better covered by autocomplete, so no complains there.
Perhaps it's a generational thing, but so far I've worked for two multinationals including a bank and I can't think of a single person that bothered to do so, except for official communications that are usually edited by someone whose very job is to do that.
Neither did my teachers at University, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the official rules are changed in the next couple of decades.
For example, in Spanish, when I was a kid it was a given fact that exclamations and questions went between marks (¿? and ¡! respectively). Nowadays it's extremely rare to see opening marks - they exist in very formal contexts like books or newspapers, but even emails in the workplace got rid of them, and using them on social media or messaging apps would be just as weird as signing the message at the end.