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(a)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?
Maybe someone should add interwiki links to these. :-)
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