I sometimes hear the same in my circles about Persian ditching the perso-arabic script. I don't get it, why can't you align a country however you like without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc? One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays. Besides, sad to see the whole world just use the latin script in the end but that's not the point

I'm not sure how surprised Americans would be to learn that there are so many "centers of Europe". After all, we all know that Colorado is in "the west", Texas in the "southwest", and, clearly, "the South" is located in the geographical southeast :D

> Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.

They have their own weirdnesses. How is Chicago "mid-west" when it is so far east? How is Virginia south?

Cuisine in Europe is shaped by climate, soil and former political entities. You'll find similar cuisine in and around the alps, along the north sea coast and around the baltic sea. While the people eating the same food speak a dozen different languages.

Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)

Western Poland used to be German, but all the Germans left/got expelled. After WW2 it was resettled with Poles from Eastern Poland, nowadays Ukraine and Belarus. Which makes traveling from Berlin to Poznan or Wroclaw an interesting experience. Directly at the German-Polish border, you'll enter Eastern Europe, then when you arrive in the mentioned cities, you're suddenly back in Central Europe.

Also, you'd be surprised at how widespread pickled herring is in Bavaria. Herring has been a trading good for millennia in Europe, was and is still consumed in the winter months in Bavaria. You can easily get a "Fischsemmel" at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Bavarians also used to pickle everything for the winter: cucumbers, beets, cabbage, beans.

Not sure what there is to lol about. '+c still composes to ć for me, and that makes sense to me; AltGr+, is ç, AltGr+c is © for me. But all of those symbols are outside my national script so I cannot say that any of them have been burdened by weight of expectation.

As Pole I never had this issue. Why would you even use US Intl keyboard. Even for Arch with install everything manually I haven't any issues

The US international keyboard settings suck. It's more convenient to enable a compose key and do diacritics with that.

"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.)

These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once.

But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them.

So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.

Original statements that led to this discussion

>>Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian

>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.

The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does.

Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers?

Put up or shut up.

  Russia        143,500,000
  Ukraine        45,490,000
  Poland         38,530,000
  Czechia        10,200,000
  Belarus         9,498,700
  Bulgaria        7,265,000
  Serbia          7,164,000
  Slovakia        5,414,000
  Croatia         4,253,000
  Bosnia and      3,829,000
    Herzegovina
  Slovenia        2,060,000
  Montenegro        621,383

What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian?

Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two:

  Ukrainian  32,577,468  67.53%
  Russian  14,273,670  29.59%

  32   million Ukrainian as 1st language
   6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language