[Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of origin

Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax at gmail.com
Tue Sep 5 00:19:12 UTC 2006


Ray Saintonge wrote:
> daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> 
>> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,  
>> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99  
>> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It  
>> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in  
>> the sample. 
>>
> I agree.  The Indian situation is far more significant than the 
> Australian one.  It is understandable that there would be very little 
> participation from speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages because 
> each has such a tiny speaker base.  It is less understandable that 
> Indian languages with a million or more speakers have had so little 
> development.
> 
> When a person from India looking at Australian edits in other languages 
> than English presumes that we are talking about other European languages 
> this suggests that the influence of the Raj is still alive and well, and 
> that the educated people of India have bought into the idea that their 
> own native languages are somehow inferior.
> 

I would suggest that it's due to the caste system; the educated rich see
the native languages as being used by the lower castes and don't want
anything to do with them?

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