I have also met a lot of Finnish people in fandom :) I think it might be because German countries and Skandinavian countries teach English very early in school and at least in Germany a lot of popular culture such as pop music is in English too. So it's easy to become fluent enough in English that you learn to "pass" for American and can talk on the same level to English speaking fans. And some even post English fic without native speakers being able to tell that an ESL person wrote it (or at least they praise it anyway).
It wouldn't be the same if an English speaking fan tried to partake in a German language fandom because few countries teach German and even the people who did take German classes, it just isn't taught as aggressively as English is taught in our countries.
Ages ago I made a meta post about people writing fic outside of their own language and I also brought up the theory that maybe sometimes it's actually easier to write on certain subject such as porn in your non-native language. Because even though let's say "Fotze" might not be more dirty than "cunt" or "Schwanz" more dirty than "cock" to us the English words do not feel as dirty because we never learned them in the same "dirty" context that we learned our mother tongue words. So we use them like any other type of learned vocabulary rather than it having an emotional/historical meaning for us.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
carisma_sensei
no subject
Date: 2009-05-04 11:11 am (UTC)It wouldn't be the same if an English speaking fan tried to partake in a German language fandom because few countries teach German and even the people who did take German classes, it just isn't taught as aggressively as English is taught in our countries.
Ages ago I made a meta post about people writing fic outside of their own language and I also brought up the theory that maybe sometimes it's actually easier to write on certain subject such as porn in your non-native language. Because even though let's say "Fotze" might not be more dirty than "cunt" or "Schwanz" more dirty than "cock" to us the English words do not feel as dirty because we never learned them in the same "dirty" context that we learned our mother tongue words. So we use them like any other type of learned vocabulary rather than it having an emotional/historical meaning for us.