[Foundation-l] A simple question on languages.

Mon Jan 28 03:47:59 UTC 2008

(sorry in advance for sending 3 messages in a row)

Also, if you are thinking that these Navajos are all gone, you're
incorrect. There may be less of them, but they very much still exist.

Mark

On 27/01/2008, 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".
>
> 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.
>

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