On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 14:57, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
2011/7/11 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com
Note that estimates from the past (and likely from the present) count that no language with less than 1M of speakers would survive 2050.
If Wikimedia projects and WMF leave to die 90% (or 80%, or 70%, or 60%) of current languages in the next 40 years (we will be alive to see it, probably), then both are failures.
I think (but I am not sure) that I posted this link [1] here a couple of weeks ago.
Speaking just about languages, the situation is approximately the next:
speakers total speakers number of languages 100M+ 2,514,548,848 9 10M-100M 2,376,900,757 78 1M-10M 950,166,458 303 100k-1M 284,119,716 900 10k-100k 61,223,297 1837 1k-10k 7,823,891 2025 100-999 460,911 1039 10-999 12,664 343 1-9 528 134 sum 6,195,257,070 6,668
So, number of languages with less than 10k is approximately 45%, but it is around 8M of people in total or 0,0015 of world population. It is highly likely that that number of languages won't exist in ~100 years. (Some of those below 10k will survive, but some of those above 10k won't.)
To make those languages viable enough to survive -- much more work than just our is needed. I am sure that 10% of military budgets of the world countries for one year would preserve all languages, but that's the other issue. Basically, that's not our failure as Wikimedians, but failure of our civilization.
[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=tCwO11tFPLPB-SJafDesypg&...