Alexander Stubb has decided that the European voters are ready to go bilingual. In addition to his native Finnish he has started to blog in the de facto lingua franca of the ever closer, or at least ever larger Europe.
This might not sound that novel of an approach at first. There has been lots of people and organizations blogging in several languages for a quite a while, no?
Yes. True. But not in the very same blog. And if you are a one man band with a lot of stuff on your schedule (just like Alex), blogging in Finnish on Monday and in English on Tuesday is very resource efficient way to go international.
This is an interesting strategy to engage the increasingly international crowd that follows blogs. In Alex’s case it makes all the sense since his mission is two fold by default: He is a member of a European wide institution (MEP) having an equally spread out political agenda, (thus making it already beneficial from the PR perspective to be seen as an internationally capable decision maker), where as his voter base is for Finnish citizens only (making him a former politician rather quickly if he only blogs in English).
Where Alex’s bilingual (or reportedly possibly trilingual: Finnish, English and Swedish) blog may be a no-brainer for somebody working in a sui generis organization like EU, what could this entail for the corporate blogging practice? Should a Finnish start-up ready to go international start blogging in ‘Finglish’, thus engaging it’s Finnish home market and at the same time giving a taste of its fabulous brand and high internal corporate ethics to the foreign country its wishing to enter.
It will be interesting to follow what comes out of Alex’s international blogging experiment, and whether this will become a larger trend. I am actually contemplating whether I should experiment with bilingual blogging when my own soon-to-be-launched-startup goes live
. What do you think?
3 Comments
It’s funny you should mention this, as I’ve been thinking a lot of multilingualism on the web recently (I even gave a talk at a tech conference). Worldwide Lexicon is an interesting project I am getting involved with that let’s you easily offer posts in many languages.
Tippingeurope, I noticed that the comments on Alex Stubb’s English blog were mainly from Finnish readers (commenting in English).
There seems to be a social aspect in addition to the linguistic one.
Blogging in three languages is hard work, I have noticed, and one or the other seems to get the upper hand, at least periodically.
Regards
Ralf Grahn
Peter,
Wouldwide Lexicon is indeed an interesting project. Might contribute to it myself.
Ralf,
Am sure you’re right about one language dominating the other periodically. This is interesting as even though there is definite overlap regarding the readers, different posts still draw different audiences at least to some extent. As the multilingual blogging becomes more wide spread it will be interesting to follow the development and implications this will create for the blogs readership.