Leo Ni Siku Yangu

Living in France the past seven years I was at first annoyed, and then slowly became habituated to, the fact that numerous internet sites were in French. The reasons for this were multifaceted. After all I was living in France, so many times these were just sites put up by local stores or offices that were naturally in the local language. Others were big multinational sites though - like airfrance for example - that would ask me to input what country I resided in, and when I ticked France, would then make the assumption that I preferred my websites in French. These sites generally would provide no obvious option for residing in a country but preferring a foreign tongue. This is not a marginal niche market but rather at least 20% of the residents of France, so it was never clear to me if this was simply a bad or lazy assumption, or perhaps some insidious pro-French language law put in place in attempt to save la belle langue from demise due to the encroachment of the ever maligned anglo-saxon culture and tongue. Presumably the same law that forces French TV stations, unlike those in most other European countries, to screen American movies only in the dubbed version, without the possibility of switching to a second audio track in version original. One of the trickiest sites was google, which would figure out my Frenchness, based on my IP address I suppose, and send me automatically to google.fr with French menus, search returns prioritizing French sites, and even customized advertisements in my googlemail in French for French holidays and French blind dates. Well, I noticed today that Google has caught on to my recent move, and I now have the wonderful opportunity to be at first annoyed, and hopefully slowly habituated to, all my menus and search results in Swahili. If you are wondering what Leo Ni Siku Yangu means, just check out the picha below. That's all for now, my early morning coffee is growing cold and its time to Ondoka and go to work.