[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Mark Williamson]

> 1) How many languages have a monolingual literate or speaking
> population of 2,000 or more speakers or writers?

It's much easier to answer that question if you take out the
qualifiers of "monolingual" and "literate".

93.88% of the world's population speaks the 347 most-spoken languages,
according to the Ethnologue.

That includes all languages with over 1 million speakers. If you try
to shorten the list by very much, the percentage decreases
dramatically - 79.46% of the world's population with the 83 languages
over 10 million; 40.21% with only 8 languages. To reach 99%, you need
to dip into languages with between 10,000 and 100,000 speakers. Even
counting just languages over 100,000 speakers, that is still over 1200
languages. Even if we reduce this into the absolute minimum number
needed to reach those people, it is still going to be a relatively
large number, likely over 500 languages (and possibly over 1000).

> 2a) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one of
> the six official languages of the United Nations (ar, en, es, fr, ru,
> zh)?

Removing again the qualifier "literate" (Arabic speakers, for example,
have a far lower literacy rate than Spanish speakers). According to
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=arb over 100
_million_ Arabs do not have spoken (and thus obviously not literate)
proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic, the unifying variety usually
used for writing in the Arab world; however that means that spoken MSA
will still reach over 100 million others around the world. Leaving
aside the question of Arabic; English, Spanish, French, Russian, and
(Standard) Chinese would reach about 40% of the world population. Note
that I did NOT do the work to remove people from that who are
bilingual in two of those languages, who would have been counted
twice. The question I think we need to ask with that though is, who is
in the other 60%? Much of Asia outside of China, and most of Africa
outside of the highly educated in former English and French colonies.
Also, we're leaving out the huge country of Brazil as well as most of
Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Indonesia (although literate Brazilians
can arguably be reached by Spanish).

> 2b) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one of
> ar, de, en, es, fr, pt, ru, zh?
By including Portuguese, you add quite a bit; by adding de:, you add
somewhat less, most of them Europeans and a portion (though not a
majority I don't think) are capable in French or English.

> 2c-f) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one
> of a list of [15, 30, 100, 200] languages chosen so as to maximize the
> answer to this question?

I answered this earlier except it was about speakers rather than
readers and didn't take bilingualism into account. By the way, people
seem to be vastly overestimating bilingualism worldwide. In 1990,
there were over 7,000 Navajos, for example, with a totally inadequate
command of the English language. Navajo is not alone in this regard,
there are hundreds of languages of a similar size worldwide with
hordes of functionally monolingual speakers.

Whether or not one speaks one of the "major languages" of the world
often depends on one's economic power (although the reverse is also
often very true, it's a bit of a Catch-22). What about people from
tribes in India who may be trilingual in, say, Tamil, Tulu, and a
tribal language, but do not speak any English or Hindi? These people
do exist, and they exist in large numbers. The idea that everybody
speaks English, or that the entire world (or even the entire literate
world) can be reached with only 8 languages is very provincial and
wrong.

-- 
Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.