What country uses '.' as the thousands separator but speaks English? Or is this someone mixing their native language thousands separator with English? Or is there some weird interaction between country and language that makes this the preferred, or at minimum an acceptable standard form? I'm actually hoping it's one of the latter options, that would be something new to me.
>What country uses '.' as the thousands separator but speaks English?
A better question is: how many non-native English speakers and writers neither know, nor particularly care about the english world thousands separator, and use what they regularly use whatever the language?
Answer: millions.
Especially when they are not writing in English to appeal to English speaking countries, but to appeal to a worldwide english speaking audience using english just as a lingua franca.
Actually, I think my question was the more interesting one, because it led to confirmation that this is expected normal use in at least some instances[1]. That was news to me, and apparently the majority of people that responded since they didn't bring it up in their responses.
Yeah the mix-up is a mess. I'm Dutch but as a programmer I've used dots for decimals my whole life. We should just get rid of the comma as decimal separator. Or do a worldwide survey for a representative sample and have a majority vote on it.
Then as for thousand separator, I always use spaces when I want to be clear (blog posts, comments), or the standard when I want to be correct (school reports, reports for our client). I've also seen apostrophe being used as unambiguous symbol but people frown at it. A little spacing is a natural way to group, especially on paper you can just write some more snugly than others and it's 100% unambiguous and perfectly legible no matter how many digits.
And while we're at it: yyyy-mm-dd, dd-mm-yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy or dd.mm.yyyy (in order of preference). Anything else is just incorrect imo. It's rare but some Dutch weirdos use our ordering neatly (ddmmyyyy) but then start using slashes, which Americans (with their incorrect though understandable mmddyyyy) typically use, and it's just impossible to disambiguate. Here too, let's have a global majority vote, at least for this calendar system -- but whatever you do, at least don't use different symbols at random.
Since when does the TLD imply the native language of the website creator?
Also the .eu TLD, which is a country-TLD for the European Union, consider that the UK (still in the EU), along with Ireland and Malta have English as an official language [1].
I think it's quite reasonable; the tld suggests the location/nationality, which suggests the language. It's not ironclad, but it's implied.
Those three english-speaking countries (UK, Ireland and Malta) make up roughly 13.7% of the total population of the EU; when the UK leaves, it will drop down to around 1.1%.
The UK and Ireland are (currently) in the EU and it's not uncommon for English-speaking organizations/individuals with a particularly internationalist perspective to use the .eu domain.
The website also has info pages about the authors: 3 from Spain and 1 from Andorra.
The first language of all authors seems to be either Spanish or Catalan.
I guess that makes sense. I was just confused for a bit because I wasn't sure if the height was in in thousands of meters or miles (but if miles, it was odd in comparison to the kilometer distances). I looked up Mt. McKinley and converted the foot rating to meters to confirm that it was indeed thousands of meters, but the process got me wondering if page was mixing locale formats, or whether the my assumption that it should have been a comma to separate the thousands was wrong.
In mainland Europe we only use the metric system, even when speaking or writing English.
Also it is common to stick to the comma as decimal separator and dot as thousands separator when writing English. This convention is independent of the language used.
Same goes for date notation, dd-mm-yyyy is used (almost) always.
In Windows or Linux for example you can select the English language with Dutch localisation. It's used by almost all software developers I know.
That's a good explanation, and actually what I thought might be going on (which is why I included that example in my original question). It's interesting, because like date formats, it can sometimes be ambiguous without sufficient context. Thanks for the explanation!
There are at least 3 EU countries which have English as an official language. Even after Brexit, there will be millions of English-native speaking people living in places where English is an official language.
Most of Eastern Europe and I think Russia use dot as thousand separator. Though it's rare to see these days, it's much more common to simply use whitespace for that, like "1 000 000 000". On the other hand, comma usage for fraction separation is still a norm, for example, 0,99.
Italy should use a dot at the top (we did when I was little and learned to write), but it's not on any keyboard, even Italian ones, so we write 1'000'000,00. But 1.000.00,00 is also common.
I don't know what Excel does but LO Calc uses this format #.###,00 for the Italian locale.
Spain maybe? I used to know the answer to this. I can at least confirm there's at least one such country that uses "." as a thousands separator. No word on whether they speak English. At this point that doesn't really matter. There are more English as a second language speakers of English than native speakers.
What country uses '.' as the thousands separator but speaks English? Or is this someone mixing their native language thousands separator with English? Or is there some weird interaction between country and language that makes this the preferred, or at minimum an acceptable standard form? I'm actually hoping it's one of the latter options, that would be something new to me.