Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
It's surprising that Bengali Wikipedia didn't start yet. There are probably more than 200 millions people speaking Bengali, although I don't how many among these have Bengali as their monther tongue (190M according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language, 207M according to other sources). And Bengali people have also a strong reputation for cultural awareness, and the Bengali language has a long tradition of poetry and literature.
The Nobel Prize (1913) winner Tagore wrote in Bengali, though probably mostly for those works that were available in English at the time. I understand that there far more of his works that have never been translated. Tagore died in 1941, so his works are essentially all in the public domain based on the life plus 60 law that prevails for India.
Each of Assamese, Burmese, Gujarati, Kannada, Khmer, Nepalese, Oriya, Panjabi, Pashtu, Sindhi, and Telugu have more than 10 millions speakers. However most of these speakers have a poor Internet connectivity at the best. So it just a matter of time when Internet connections become easily available in these parts of the world.
These are probably langiages that we would really like to serve. Gujarati, Punjabi and Pashtu all have significant diasporas where there are people that are in a better position to take the initiative. Here in the Vancouver area the Punjabi Sikhs are one of the largest immigrant communities. Maybe I should enter into promotional discussions with some of them..
Another advantage that is available for the Asian languages is an established written language. This is not the case for most African or native American languages. It's just a matter of time before the Asians get it together.
Ec