[Foundation-l] List of Wikimedia projects and languages

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 14:57, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/7/11 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>
>> Note that estimates from the past (and likely from the present) count
>> that no language with less than 1M of speakers would survive 2050.
>
> If Wikimedia projects and WMF leave to die 90% (or 80%, or 70%, or 60%) of
> current languages in the next 40 years (we will be alive to see it,
> probably), then both are failures.

I think (but I am not sure) that I posted this link [1] here a couple
of weeks ago.

Speaking just about languages, the situation is approximately the next:

speakers   total speakers  number of languages
100M+	2,514,548,848	9
10M-100M	2,376,900,757	78
1M-10M	950,166,458	303
100k-1M	284,119,716	900
10k-100k	61,223,297	1837
1k-10k	7,823,891	2025
100-999	460,911	1039
10-999	12,664	343
1-9	528	134
sum	6,195,257,070	6,668

So, number of languages with less than 10k is approximately 45%, but
it is around 8M of people in total or 0,0015 of world population. It
is highly likely that that number of languages won't exist in ~100
years. (Some of those below 10k will survive, but some of those above
10k won't.)

To make those languages viable enough to survive -- much more work
than just our is needed. I am sure that 10% of military budgets of the
world countries for one year would preserve all languages, but that's
the other issue. Basically, that's not our failure as Wikimedians, but
failure of our civilization.

[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=tCwO11tFPLPB-SJafDesypg&authkey=CPCE5pMB#gid=1