[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

[Mark Williamson]

On 28/01/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

It is. But it's much easier to answer. The numbers just don't exist
for an answer to your total question. Literacy rates can change
rapidly as well in certain areas due to community-based efforts. If
all 100000 speakers of a language become literate within 5 years, that
adds another language we have to "contend" with.

> > 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?

Native speakers. However, as I noted previously, using the 6 languages
of the United Nations, INCLUDING second-language speakers, your reach
will still be under 50%. I didn't check out the statistics for
second-language speakers for, say, the top 20 languages, but as one
can imagine, there is a strong correlation between the number of
native speakers a language has and the number of second-language
speakers (with notable outliers such as French and Japanese, on
opposite sides). Thus, outside of the top 15 or so languages, the
number of people who speak the language as their second language is
usually going to be insignificant compared to the number of native
speakers. I guarantee you that even incorporating all bilinguals,
you're not going to be able to reach greater than 75% with less than
50 languages, and quite likely many more.

Remember, we're talking about FUNCTIONAL bilingualism -- someone being
able to understand or even get the gist of a press release written in
plain language, NOT someone knowing how to cater to customers at their
restaurant in a different language. That is a very limited type of
bilingualism, where it is limited to use in one domain. People who
seem to "speak English" because they know what "I'll give you $5 for
that statue over there" will often not know much English outside of
what their business requires.

Mark

> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


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