[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Yann Forget]

Andre Engels wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> 
>> Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000
>> articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of
>> 2009.  The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African
>> language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than
>> 13,000 Wikipedia articles.  Can poverty and illiteracy alone
>> explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind?
> 
> Poverty, or better said, lack of internet access, is probably the main
> factor. Here in Europe and North America, we are used to having fast
> internet from the home 24/7. In those countries it may well be (I am
> not sure, never having been there) that dial-up speeds paid per minute
> at some internet cafe is the norm. That would considerably lessen
> people's interest in writing the material, and if it is not written,
> people will not read it either.
> 
> But another issue could be a lack of expectancy of having material in
> the own language. I have heard this plays a role with the languages
> from India, and it may well have the same, or even stronger so, with
> the African ones: the daily language for speaking is the local
> language, but when one is writing or looking for something on the
> internet, one is more likely to use English (or in other parts of
> Africa, French). It may well be that many Swahili speakers use English
> when they are on the internet - either because that is the language
> they learned reading and writing in (although people for which that is
> true are probably not the generation using internet the most), or
> because they found that they can get so much more information (on the
> internet as a whole) in English than in Swahili, that it well
> outweighs the linguistic disadvantage. They come to the English
> Wikipedia, not the Swahili one, and when they find that here too there
> is much more in English, that's where they stick.

This explains the situation very well.
In the case of languages not using the Latin alphabet, there is one more
obstacle: you need a localized computer, i.e. for reading, at least the
proper fonts are needed, and for writing an adapted keyboard is also
needed. For what I have seen, this is rarely the case in India. Every
computer is sold with an English keyboard only, and the fonts must be
installed by the user himself.

> In the case of Swahili there is yet another factor, namely that
> Swahili itself is rarely a mother tongue and much more often a second
> language. Because of that, the relative size of the disadvantage of
> using English is even smaller.

Right. This is also the case for Hindi, the second or third language for
more than 200 M speakers (native Assamese, Bengali, Bihari, Gujarati,
Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya or Punjabi speakers and more).

Yann

>> But Swahili is far from the worst.  Swahili has twice as many
>> speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are
>> huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k),
>> but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs
>> 172 k).  Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in
>> more detail.  For the speakers of these languages, in which
>> proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio
>> broadcasts) to get news and knowledge?  Do they ever use (printed)
>> encyclopedias?
> 
> Taking a look at Wikipedia, I see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Nigeria and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Kenya. For Nigeria
> about 32 newspapers are given - from their titles, 80% seem to be in
> English. The 3 or 4 mentioned for Kenya are all in English, and
> although the articles mention some of the papers have Swahili sister
> publications, the English language newspapers seem to have by far the
> greatest market share. This I think confirms my hypothesis above, that
> another reason for African languages to do so poorly is that in the
> countries and regions where they are spoken, there is a large
> competition from the languages of the former colonizers - especially
> in the area of written communication.

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