If you’re a reader of this blog who knows me personally, you might have wondered why I chose English as the main language for this website. This was originally a topic I’d wanted to put on the About page, but I kind of forgot to include it when I was writing the text for said About page. This fact came to my attention recently, when I was reviewing some of the stuff I’ve written since the beginning, so I figured I’d just write a full post about it, in which I’d also be able to go into the details a bit more, which I thought would be nice.

Now, there are two distinct reasons for my writing this blog in English, I think. For one, English is almost always the language of choice when talking about IT online. Take GitHub, for example, or almost all documentation on popular pieces of software or APIs. So it kind of just felt natural to start writing in English when I first opened the file that was to contain my first blog post. And in addition to that, I can now also practice my English, which is really great, because it has become quite rusty in the last 1.5 years or so, during my military service.

The second reason is a less technical one. And it’s a bit hard to explain, to be honest. But I’ll try, nonetheless.

I guess that I have some kind of a different connection to English than to German or to my mother tongue, which is Swiss German. My not wanting to write in Swiss German I can kind of understand, because, in my opinion, it is just really not a pretty language and I generally dislike Swiss German writing or poetry. I’m sure that some people enjoy it, and there are certainly many talented writers, poets and musicians who practice their respective arts in Swiss German, but it just isn’t for me.

It becomes a bit more complicated when I think of German (or High German, more specifically). It’s not that I dislike the language in general or that I don’t like German texts. I loved reading Goethe, Hoffmann, Zweig and all their peers in school and all of the reading of my early teens I did in German. Mostly, though, I read German translations of fiction like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Skulduggery Pleasant, which is part of the problem, I imagine. Something always gets lost in translation, just like when you see a mere picture or photocopy of a great painting. You can see its colours, discern its motives and grasp its meaning, but it is still not quite the same as if you were to marvel at the original’s beauty while standing at arm’s length from the canvas the original artist brought to life with careful and measured strokes of the brush. Since having realised that when re-reading a book I liked in its original English edition, I generally try to read all books in their respective original language (if I happen to be versed in that language). And because almost all of my favourite authors¹ write their books in English, it is also the language I read most of my books in. So it kind of makes sense that I’d prefer writing in English … I guess? Does that make sense? I don’t know, to be honest. It’s difficult to put into words, but there’s just something about English writing that scratches the itch in my literary mind in a way that German writing can’t. Or hasn’t yet, I should say.

So, yeah, to summarise, I think I’d say that, despite my deep appreciation of High German literature, I chose to write this blog (and this website) in English, because it is “The Language of the Internet”, because most of my favourite writing is in English and because sometimes, English just kind of inexplicably feels right.