It's really inspiring to see Stack Overflow meetup events being held in almost 100 cities around the world. Here's where the meetup groups are:
That made me think again about Stack Exchange in other languages. Now, Stack Exchange isn't just software. Localizing it isn't just a matter of translating the strings. It's a community, so when we have a Stack Exchange site conducting Q&A in, say, Japanese, we'll need moderators and community coordinators to liaise between that community and the company who speak Japanese.
I grabbed our Google Analytics data showing the number of visits we had from the top 30 countries in the last month, and compared it to the population of those countries to get the all-important Stack Overflow Country Ranking, that is, the number of visits we had per 1000 population. The winner? Sweden, with an incredible 71 visits to Stack Overflow per 1000 population.
Country Visits Population Visits per 1000 Sweden 671,605 9,422,661 71 Singapore 324,063 5,076,700 64 Finland 321,438 5,380,000 60 Denmark 329,927 5,560,628 59 Israel 431,482 7,708,400 56 Switzerland 402,720 7,782,900 52 Netherlands 849,640 16,659,800 51 Canada 1,753,086 34,409,000 51 United Kingdom 2,984,833 62,041,708 48 Australia 1,066,756 22,611,000 47 United States 13,134,911 311,108,000 42 Belgium 406,232 10,827,519 38 Czech Republic 323,624 10,515,818 31 Germany 1,947,367 81,802,000 24 France 1,222,689 65,821,885 19 Poland 675,256 38,092,000 18 Romania 366,955 21,466,174 17 Spain 746,397 46,152,925 16 Italy 835,370 60,605,053 14 Ukraine 399,344 45,778,500 9 South Korea 370,335 48,988,833 8 Russia 775,040 142,905,200 5 Turkey 361,542 73,722,988 5 Brazil 755,084 190,732,694 4 Vietnam 319,379 86,930,000 4 Philippines 325,977 94,013,200 3 India 4,046,059 1,210,193,422 3 Japan 369,577 127,960,000 3 Mexico 297,180 112,336,538 3 China 717,011 1,341,000,000 1
Even though English is the de facto lingua franca of programming, the dramatic differences in how much Stack Overflow is used in various first-world countries almost certainly reflects linguistic demographics. In my experience, almost every programmer I've ever met from Scandinavia is pretty much 100% fluent in English. But the low participation from countries like Japan, where there are tons of programmers who don't really like to work in English, makes me think that if we want to accomplish our goal of world dominationmaking the Internet better, we're going to have to make Stack Exchange work for non-English speakers, too.
One thing we discovered early on about setting up new Stack Exchange communities is that they only work if you have a critical mass of experienced users who know how the system works. The Area 51 process is designed to insure that we only open sites for which we have a group of committed users. This process has worked well: so far we've opened 40+ sites of which only three failed. So when we open the first non-English site, it's going to have to be pioneered by experienced, bilingual Stack Exchange users.
My guess would be that the most valuable local editions would be in Korean and Japanese, countries with a large community of programmers who are evidently under-served by English Stack Overflow, but we don't do things based on intuition, here: we do things that you tell us to do. So we're depending on you to tell us how we should launch versions of Stack Overflow in languages other than English. If you speak another language fluently and think that the world would benefit from Stack Exchanges in that language, propose them on Area 51. As usual, if you have ideas or suggestions or want to volunteer your services for how we can establish useful, thriving communities in other languages, bring them up on meta.stackoverflow.com. We're listening!