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There is an expression "X-speaking country", where X is any language.

How to describe a place (e.g internet forum) where people write in a language? For example, people usually write in English on reddit:

"reddit.com is <...> English site"

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  • Well, there's 'anglophone' if that's a close enough fit. BTW, in the French-speaking world they use 'la francophonie' for ALL those countries. We could, I guess, use Anglophonia similarly.
    – David Garner
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 17:58
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    But -phone means "voice, sound". (φωνή on wiktionary). I want the phrase to have meaning of writing in a language.
    – andrybak
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 18:05
  • "reddit.com is primarily an English site"
    – amdn
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 18:36
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    To answer the question in your title literally: Scriptorium.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 19:42
  • @andrybak, sorry, didn't read your post carefully. I think amdn got it.
    – David Garner
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 23:53

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I'm not sure you need to use the sentence structure that you are trying to use to get your point across. Why not simply use, "Most content on reddit.com is in English." (Or, "all content" - I don't know if there is non-English content.)

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The United States of America is an English literate country.

Reddit is a an English literate site.

Sina Weibo is a Simplified Chinese literate site.

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    Sorry, but never in my long and wicked life have I heard that locution. Has anyone else?
    – David Pugh
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 21:12
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    And a dismayingly large number of Americans are not literate in any language :-(
    – jamesqf
    Commented May 5, 2015 at 23:43
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I think you would still use the -speaking suffix. Even though we don't actually speak on web sites, the term generalizes to refer to any medium. After all, in an X-speaking country, we expect most books and periodicals also to be written in language X.

The only reason we might need a different term for writing is if we were in a place where the language used in writing differed from the spoken language, so we would have to distinguish them. I'm not sure there are such places, although there are places where the language used in casual settings is different from that used in more formal settings. There are also places where there are multiple writing systems (Japanese, for instance), and one might need to indicate which one is used.

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  • "the language used in writing differed from the spoken language". This is a mostly Francophone country but my girlfriend has just been talking to her mom in Bamaleke. The unwritten "tribal" languages are alive and well. Probably not what you meant, though. In Japan, one speaks of something being written in kanji or in hiragana, I've never seen either being used as an English adjective hyphenated with "written", have you?
    – David Pugh
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 21:18
  • Unwritten tribal languages are the kinds of things I was referring to when I said languages used in casual settings. I'm not aware of a suffix for writing.
    – Barmar
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 21:23
  • Japanese doesn't really have multiple writing systems. It has one system with different scripts used for different purposes, all of which might well be found in a short written piece. Kanji (Chinese ideographs) carry the main meaning of words, hiragana are used for verb tenses, participles, etc, katakana for foreign & technical terms, and so on.
    – jamesqf
    Commented May 5, 2015 at 23:48

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