[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Thomas Dalton]

On 28/01/2008, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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".

But then it's a completely different question.

> 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).

Are those native speakers, or speakers in general?