You have a very distorted view of linguistic diversity in Africa.
First of all, while there are definitely more than 500 languages in Africa, there are only 10 or 20 with over 1 million speakers.
It is very linguistically imperialistic of you to assume that the entire population of Africa is best-served by English.
Mark
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:16:12 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
For that matter, in the computerless world, even languages such as German and French and Spanish are relatively rare. We are talking here about targeting entire continents such as Africa which are best served by native-language content which we cannot currently provide in any way shape or form. We have growing Arabic and Afrikaans Wikipedias, a minimal Swahili Wikipedia, just beginning Wolof, Bambara, Zulu, Somali, and Amharic Wikipedias, and can already obviously provide English, French, and Portuguese-language content for those Africans who can speak these languages fluently.
I'd question that: I think Africa is "best served" by whatever content the most people can read, which is likely to be English. Even expanding to say, four languages, the best choices are likely to be English, French, Arabic, and Swahili (although I can't find very good statistics on this). Unless you have a plan to simultaneously publish editions in 500 different languages, publishing in the major languages---i.e. those that the most people are able to make use of---seems like the best plan.
-Mark
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