You're wrong about Navajo. Hundreds of thousands of speakers, yes. (180k is about right iirc?) Millions? Unfortunately, no.
There are few Native American languages with over 1 million speakers, those include:
Guarani (3 million iirc, official language of Peru) Nahuatl (if you consider it to be a single language; about 15 million I think??) Quechua (about 8 million) Aymara (about 6 million)
And I *think* that's all. No, Navajo, Ojibwe, Cree, Cherokee, blah, blah etc. do *not* have over 1 million speakers.
Some of the native languages of Arizona: Navajo: 150.000 (about 80.000 in Arizona,) - iirc O'odham: 35.000 (??... also spoken in Mexico in the state of Sonora) Yaqui: 16.450 (of the divergent Arizona Yaqui there are 450, the rest are of the Mexican dialect and only in Mexico) W. Apache aka Coyotero Apache: 13.000 Zuni: 10.000 (mostly in New Mexico - perhaps only a few hundred in Arizona) Hopi: 5.500 Ute & S. Paiute: 2.000 (largely in Nevada, Colorado, Utah) Tewa: 1.300 (mostly in New Mexico) Walapai: 1.000 Havasupai: 550 Chiricahua Apache: 300 (almost all in New Mexico and Oklahoma) Maricopa & Xalychidom: 200 Yavapai: 200 Quechan: 150 Cocopah: 150 Mojave: 75 (on the Arizona-California border) Chemehuevi: 10 (on the Arizona-California border) - iirc Kickapoo: (don't think there are any in Arizona, most Kickapoo speakers live in Oklahoma or Mexico)
The numbers however are often wildly inaccurate, most are higher, some are off by just a little but others are off by a _lot_. For some of the languages, you could be misled to believe that not many of the ethnic group speak it anymore, yet the ethnic group is small as well (Havasupai is spoken by 99% of living Havasupai people, yet there are only 550 speakers; Walapai on the other hand has 1.000 speakers but there at least twice as many Walapai people)
Mark
On 28/05/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
V. Ivanov wrote:
The idea is not absolutely new. We use the absolutely similar approach at the Ossetic Wikipedia (we call it "Project <<Tskhinval Teachers>>". The essence of the project is paying teachers from South Ossetia a 2,5-USD equivalent for every article (up from 2500 characters).
Aw man! I would gladly pay that sum to anyone who can write articles in some of my favourite exotic languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Navajo, Nahuatl, Hmong -- all of these are million-speaker languages).
Maybe we should make this concept better known globally. Maybe we should organise a list of Wikipedians who are prepared to give money to poor people in return for an article in a language that has an inactive Wikipedia. The Wikipedians would be able to specify any conditions, but once their conditions are fulfilled, they should be legally obliged to pay out the money they offered.
Of course, for that to work, there needs to be a way of getting the message (and later, the money) to the people. Maybe someone has a few ideas?
http://os.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B6%D1%83%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B9%D1%82%D1%8... http://os.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B7%D1%83%D1%86%D1%86%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8...
Maybe someone should add interwiki links to these. :-)
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