Bits&Chips goes English

The Dutch language is important to us at Bits&Chips. We do our very best to present technology in clear and attractive Dutch, and to keep English from creeping over the threshold as well as we can. Recently, however, we’ve decided to throw open the door.

For more than sixteen years, we’ve worked to Dutchify English terms whenever possible. By serving our Dutch and Flemish readers in their native language, we steer clear of the space inhabited by English-language giants such as the EE Times. In the high-tech sector, where English is the lingua franca, that’s hardly a sinecure. Sometimes our linguistic purism engenders compliments; at other times it gives rise to frowns. And once in a great while, someone witheringly asks us whether we take what we do seriously.

We have long viewed our Dutchness as a strength, but it’s slowly becoming a weakness as well. We fail to reach a growing percentage of the high-tech industry in Belgium and the Netherlands with it: more and more foreigners are working in the sector, and they don’t read Bits&Chips because they haven’t mastered Dutch. According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency’s report on foreign knowledge workers in the Netherlands, the country’s knowledge-intensive industries, which include the high-tech sectors, employed more than 7500 migrant workers in 2014. And given our homeland’s lagging growth, this number will only increase.