From my knowledge of the Australian census and what I
can find on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, we don't have this
information about Australians either. It seems we don't know what other languages
people can speak. The only statistic available is *households* which speak a language
other than English, which greatly under-estimates the ability of any individual to speak
that language as it depends on who they are living with and fails to tell us how well that
other language is spoken by any individual.
This issue came up for Australian Wikipedians in connection with Indigenous languages.
Despite the fact that we get asked to provide information on Wikipedia on the number of
people who speak either any Indigenous language or a particular Indigenous language, we
have no ability to answer that question except for whole households. And since (depending
on how you define "language") there were 250+ Indigenous languages (with even
more sub-dialects), even a household entirely composed of Indigenous people may not have a
common Indigenous language to speak at home.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Federico Leva (Nemo)
Sent: Friday, 14 September 2018 12:16 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>; Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] New viz.: Wikipedias, participation per language
Always nice to see language data presented in an appealing way!
Samuel Klein, 10/09/2018 23:27:
Do we have data on "# of speakers of language X
who don't speak a
better-covered lang as a secondary language"?
I usually have a very hard time finding such data from official/reliable sources, even for
EU languages. (I usually search for CLDR purposes.)
Federico
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