David Gerard wrote:
On 22/01/07, teun spaans teun.spaans@gmail.com wrote:
The low representation of Indian citizens surprises me. I met one or two at the english wikipedia / commons, perhaps they tend to prefer the english wiki above their local languages?
This appears to be the case. The educated classes tend to learn in English and to talk to each other in English. There are many native languages in India, but the one that all educated people are likely to speak is English, so that's the one that gets spoken. English is regarded as higher status than the local languages.
That and by being foreign English is not seen as giving an advantage to a ny particular part of the country as would be the case with a native language.
Ec