On 28/01/2008, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
1) How many
languages have a monolingual literate or speaking
population of 2,000 or more speakers or writers?
It's much easier to answer that question if you take out the
qualifiers of "monolingual" and "literate".
But then it's a completely different question.
93.88% of the world's population speaks the 347
most-spoken languages,
according to the Ethnologue.
That includes all languages with over 1 million speakers. If you try
to shorten the list by very much, the percentage decreases
dramatically - 79.46% of the world's population with the 83 languages
over 10 million; 40.21% with only 8 languages. To reach 99%, you need
to dip into languages with between 10,000 and 100,000 speakers. Even
counting just languages over 100,000 speakers, that is still over 1200
languages. Even if we reduce this into the absolute minimum number
needed to reach those people, it is still going to be a relatively
large number, likely over 500 languages (and possibly over 1000).
Are those native speakers, or speakers in general?