Board Thread:Off-Topic Discussion/@comment-1676371-20180513053832/@comment-5424911-20180610172615

Angel Emfrbl wrote: [...]There are still things like Maika English or any other language, but they went over this in Sonika's release and before Maika it was SeeU getting praise... So they just jumped on board the gravy train of languages or whatever, I just thought if another vocaloid with more phonetics came along that would replace Maika. They so wanted there to be a vocaloid they could use without using Englsh Vocaloids I often felt. With the current generation of English Vocaloids all out-bidding Maika, I pretty much don't care because Maika was a Spanish Vocaloid foremost above all things. I often thought that since the extra phonetics were for Catalan stuff, that Maika was part of the bid to get Catalan notable again so its mostly politics, there has been this in recent years... When the big fuss about voting independence from Spanin also.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia

Being able to do proper Catalan or anything related to this is quite popular in the area so it doesn't surprise me if this was part of it too. [...] Gotta say some things about the matter. Maika's been often told by several people from different languages that she's a "Swiss knife" compared to other Vocaloids and that's a fact that can't be ignored as it's the main gimmick of it. Each user has their own native language with their respective variations of it so having a bank that allows you to, for example, make a vowel more open or closed changing her default phoneme for another one is actually pretty rare on Vocaloid banks, let alone that the combination exists on the bank's dictionary.

If another Vocaloid came out that would have more phonemes (or even if Miku actually got all 3 languages together into a single bank), that Vocaloid would also be able to sing numerous languages as well via phoneme editing like Maika (and not natively obviously, but maybe really understandable and smooth). The bank's not "overpraised and overrated" when most of the fandom actually uses her for different languages and third parties acknowledge that it's clear to understand.

Also as a native Catalan speaker (plus I've been watching Maika's development and info since her release), Maika's a Spanish bank that has extra phonemes for Catalan (this already makes null the statement of her VP being La Oreja de Van Gogh's current lead singer) and some extra phonemes added for other languages that are not used in either Spanish or Catalan.

Lastly, Maika's Catalan phoneme extension was done to promote her bank in Barcelona's main festivity (La Mercé) as it was done in collaboration with the cultural association in there. This has nothing to do with political stuff (which started getting more magnitude way later than Maika's release) nor its only purpose was to make the language popular.