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TIL You can leagally drop your baby off at the fire station in all 50 states
(en.wikipedia.org)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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The US is simply where the highest number of anglophones reside. You'd have to sum up the next three nations to get more English speakers than the US (according to worldatlas.com).
Assuming an English speaker on the internet is American is still rude, but not exactly a bad guess - and hardly chauvinism imo
Around 1½ billion people in the world know English, less than ¼ of them live in the US.
Don't do numbers at me, if a quarter of the roulette wheel says USA we both know where you're putting your money.
Again, nobody said it was clean thinking or appropriate to pre-judge, only that you can easily see how the mistake gets made without ever calling it chauvinism.
This is the point where I strongly disagree with you, constantly mistaking less than ¼ for being the most likely is not easily made, there's a good reason for why the expression US Defaultism exists, because a particular mindset is required for such a mistake to be easily made.
~25% is a lot when you're talking about demographics that large. It's saying that there's a 1 in 4 chance of any English speaker you encounter being from the US vs every other country in the world.
If you're looking at native English speakers, it's about 63%.
But that's not the point, the point is that more than 3 out of 4 people able to read this post don't live in the US.
That's exactly why though. The likeliest guesses are either "the US" or "somewhere else". Specificity is always a more compelling heuristic.
I'd bet about 10% of them live in India alone! It's been my experience that when people think about the global populace as a whole they don't give India nearly as much weight as it warrants XD
Anglophone is an incorrect metric.
There are more non native English speakers than native English speakers.
On English speaking websites and communities there is no difference between those two as long as the website or community is not specifically for that purpose.
Most people on Lemmy do not live in the US.
Again, and I've tried to be very clear about this, I'm not saying they're correct. We agree that it's a mistake. I'm explaining how it is an easy mistake to make.
This is a frustrating conversation.
For a while, I was trying to start all my comments with things like 'to add... ' or, 'just to clarify..' if I was agreeing but context pr more info or whatever
etc since it seems like the default is to assume any response to a comment is conflict / disagreement.
May be time to bring that back
Some people are just influenced by the evil of Giygas, always on the attack. It's not my job to hit them with a frying pan.
There, fixed
looks at the biggest crowd in the lineup
Yes, that's a safe enough inference.