@hazelnot There's a subset of Dutch people who speak very good English, pretty much indistinguishable from native speakers, yeah - but they're not really the majority. The majority have the typical "stone coal English" accent and weird sentence constructions.

Given the demographic of Dutch people who use YouTube, it's therefore very suspicious when *none* of the commenters have those linguistic tells. There should be at least *some* who speak imperfect English...

@joepie91 Interesting. Yeah I thought the perfect English ones were the *only* kinda cause I was like "oh well Dutch and English are pretty close so maybe that's just what it sounds like"

To be fair my sample consisted entirely of YouTubers like PJiggles and... probably more but I forgot their names, first time I realized there is actually a Dutch accent was when I came across Marcel Vos' channel and thought he was French or something at first lol

@joepie91 Oh also Decino but at first I thought he was Polish lmao

@hazelnot Oh, Marcel Vos' accent isn't even that bad. You should hear the typical Dutch person :)

The reality is that a large chunk of the population just doesn't ever interact with English-language communities unless the subject is the Netherlands (for nationalism reasons), so "Dutch people in English communities" end up being a very narrow demographic that speaks unusually good Dutch.

@joepie91 That's even more surprising considering the reputation Dutch people have (i.e. everyone speaks good English, to the point where some young Dutch people think Dutch is cringe and just choose to speak English instead)

@hazelnot Well, I wouldn't say everyone speaks *good* English. It's true that any one person you speak to in NL is likely to be able to communicate with you in English, but it's going to be pretty stilted outside of the major city centers especially.

It's likely true that younger generations are more likely to grow up speaking English commonly, mainly due to there not really being any Dutch social media left, but that's only really younger generations.

@hazelnot Tangent: personally I've found that Dutch is better at emotional and metaphorical language, whereas English is better at explanatory language.

I therefore can't help but see "Dutch is cringe" in light of the increasing individualism and suppression of emotions in the culture here...

@joepie91 Yeahhh that's a problem in many places, people just find the cultures they were raised in "cringe" just cause it's not American culture >.>

It used to mostly be a thing in former colonies like Canada and Australia and Brazil (in relation to Portugal in that case) and stuff but lately it seems to be happening to just, countries in the US' sphere of influence even if they're not directly under its control

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_cringe

(apologies if you already knew all this lmao)

@hazelnot I did not! Thanks :)

@joepie91 Oh ok I was wrong, the bit about Brazil was in relation to both European cultures and the US, not specifically Portugal

@joepie91 Fair enough. It's kind of a thing in Romania as well, with urban middle class young people (including myself even though I'm not that young anymore) speaking "Romglish" and just mixing and matching words and sentences from both languages

I've kinda consciously tried to stop myself from using it as much as I used to cause I don't like the idea that I'm complicit in my own imperalization by the US, but when hanging out with certain people it becomes painfully obvious how much I still do it lol

@hazelnot I do mix-and-match languages quite a lot, but not just when speaking with Dutch folks; I likewise tend to use Dutch idioms when speaking to non-Dutch folks and then translate/explain them. That's what ended up working best for me, and also nicely counterbalances the cultural imperialism thing a bit.

@joepie91 Oh cool, when I'm with friends from other countries I just incessantly tell them about various interesting linguistic facts and funny expressions in Romanian hahah

@joepie91 In fact, given that the purpose of a system is what it was, that's exactly what Google set out to do. It means they have a bunch of folks, including paid sock puppet farms, putting out free labor to drive "engagement" on their platform. And then they have free rein to moderate how they see fit in order to let *their* preferred point of view bubble to the top. Where they care, of course; I doubt they care about urban planning in the Netherlands beyond being able to build datacenters wherever they like with cheap power, bandwidth, and water.

@Riedler Personally, my suspicion would be a trollfarm; the comments are not consistent enough for all of them to be clearly repeating the same video's worth of talking points, and they talk about a fairly wide variety of urban planning topics in NL, all of which are relatively obscure.

I think there would be a pretty clear motive; walkable city design has been seeing a surge in popularity lately, and a lot of this is based on past projects and research from the Netherlands, and so it would make a lot of sense for the car industry - with their decades-long documented history of effective propaganda campaigns - to start pushing back against that with misinformation, because it's a threat to their economic dominance (which is kind of the point).

I don't have any more concrete evidence than circumstantial evidence for this, though, but it would be consistent with said industry's existing track record.