Andre Engels wrote:
On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Lars Aronssonlars@aronsson.se wrote:
Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000 articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of 2009. The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than 13,000 Wikipedia articles. Can poverty and illiteracy alone explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?
Poverty, or better said, lack of internet access, is probably the main factor. Here in Europe and North America, we are used to having fast internet from the home 24/7. In those countries it may well be (I am not sure, never having been there) that dial-up speeds paid per minute at some internet cafe is the norm. That would considerably lessen people's interest in writing the material, and if it is not written, people will not read it either.
But another issue could be a lack of expectancy of having material in the own language. I have heard this plays a role with the languages from India, and it may well have the same, or even stronger so, with the African ones: the daily language for speaking is the local language, but when one is writing or looking for something on the internet, one is more likely to use English (or in other parts of Africa, French). It may well be that many Swahili speakers use English when they are on the internet - either because that is the language they learned reading and writing in (although people for which that is true are probably not the generation using internet the most), or because they found that they can get so much more information (on the internet as a whole) in English than in Swahili, that it well outweighs the linguistic disadvantage. They come to the English Wikipedia, not the Swahili one, and when they find that here too there is much more in English, that's where they stick.
This explains the situation very well. In the case of languages not using the Latin alphabet, there is one more obstacle: you need a localized computer, i.e. for reading, at least the proper fonts are needed, and for writing an adapted keyboard is also needed. For what I have seen, this is rarely the case in India. Every computer is sold with an English keyboard only, and the fonts must be installed by the user himself.
In the case of Swahili there is yet another factor, namely that Swahili itself is rarely a mother tongue and much more often a second language. Because of that, the relative size of the disadvantage of using English is even smaller.
Right. This is also the case for Hindi, the second or third language for more than 200 M speakers (native Assamese, Bengali, Bihari, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya or Punjabi speakers and more).
Yann
But Swahili is far from the worst. Swahili has twice as many speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k), but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs 172 k). Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in more detail. For the speakers of these languages, in which proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio broadcasts) to get news and knowledge? Do they ever use (printed) encyclopedias?
Taking a look at Wikipedia, I see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Nigeria and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Kenya. For Nigeria about 32 newspapers are given - from their titles, 80% seem to be in English. The 3 or 4 mentioned for Kenya are all in English, and although the articles mention some of the papers have Swahili sister publications, the English language newspapers seem to have by far the greatest market share. This I think confirms my hypothesis above, that another reason for African languages to do so poorly is that in the countries and regions where they are spoken, there is a large competition from the languages of the former colonizers - especially in the area of written communication.