What's with the double commas?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been seeing a lot of less formal text with what I consider odd punctuation:

I said ,,Let’s go“ then he said ,,Not now“

I realize that using double commas to open a quotation is standard punctuation in some languages - but I’m seeing it by people who I assume to be native English speakers. Is it something the kids-of-today are doing? Does using commas mean something different than using quotation marks? Is it a specific program? (Also, why is the ending quotation mark nearly always an opening curly quote rather than a closing one?)

2

The text was probably created with the word processor set to a different language. If you have Word, start a new document, set the proofing language to German, and you’ll see that it automatically creates quotation marks this way:

Here is my „quoted text“ with quotation marks.

3

As a “kid-of-today,” I haven’t seen this type of writing anywhere until now. Maybe a puncuation mistake? I dunno.

4

I think @dirtball is right. A word processor set to Danish can do that too.

5

I agree this is the reason. It may not even involve a word processor, but just a website, as many will try to introduce those types of features. Or it could be the keyboard software on their phone doing it.

What they have in common is that, for some reason, they are set in a different language. They may even just be Germans or Danes or other such nationalities who often speak more than one language natively.

That’s what it’s been every time I’ve noticed it and could check.

6

Growing up in the overlap between the typewriter and computer eras I didn’t really learn that the correct typeset quotation marks in Norway are technically these «guillemets» until MS Word became advanced enough to automatically use them when language was set to Norwegian.

7

A lot of languages use that style. Here’s an EU breakdown of quotation mark formatting:

https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/formex/physical-specifications/character-encoding/use-of-quotation-marks-in-the-different-languages

8

I mentioned in the OP that I know a lot of languages use that style.

I’m seeing it with people who appear to be Americans and native English speakers. I suppose their phones could be set to German or Danish (or some other language where the double comma is common), but that seems like an odd choice.

9

It is an odd choice for an English speaker. But my point of view is that I do copyediting work, mostly for people who are self-publishing, and I see a lot of formatting and style choices that seem so odd that this wouldn’t even move the needle.

It’s not unthinkable for a writer, by way of being careless with software settings or by copying and pasting, or whatever, to end up with something like this by accident and simply be too technically inept to have a clue as to what to do about it (or even to be totally oblivious to the wrongness of it).