fordy on 12 January 2013
English by default gets chosen as the universal language because A. Thanks to the British Empire, a fair majority of countries speak the language natively, and B. Since the internet was developed mostly as a joint effort between The UK and the US, it gained universal language status on the internet. Take a look at Unicode's predecessor; ASCII. It only dealt with the latin alphabet.
It all comes down to appeal. If the majority of the forum speak English natively, then it's probably a good idea to engage said forum with English, the same way that we shouldn't go into a majority French forum and expect English posts to be recognised.
