Blogging Outside of Your Community By Not Blogging in Your Native Tongue — A person writing in a language that is not their own, especially when those words are published for all to read, may bear a responsibility to their readers to disclose that the language in the blog is not their native language, thus, giving readers a chance to forgive them before they correct them. — Read More… | Digg Story

I do agree with the author, that blogging outside your community has an impact on the number of people following you inside the community. For philsblogging.com, it has had a postive effect, too — at least on my blog, there are about 50% international visitors.

For my part I have to admit, that blogging in English it has been more of an experiment in the beginning and a way of getting closer to a language. If you ask me, it turned out as fairly successful. Getting back to a mono-lingual blog would mean saying good-bye to 50% of my visitors. I wouldn’t possibly want to lock out my international visitors, would I? *evil laugh* — Not gonna.

One last thing: On the one hand, I don’t like reading blogs where even I can find grammuh-mistakes, typoes and other messie langwhich* (that crime isn’t just committed by non-natives). However, on the other I enjoy reading blogs making fun of false usage of language, don’t you? Check out the webtip Grammar, Syntax, Errors.

Being close to fluency does help to articulate exactly what I want. The author mentions an example of someone who has learned English as a second language and somehow messed up one sentence: “Can you please help me?” turned into “Can you please me?” — Slips like that can be quite entertaining.

* I am well aware that it should rather be grammar mistakes, typos and messy language. Just to calm down people who are overprotective with language. I am one of them, admittedly.