[Foundation-l] Languages and numbers

Mon Jun 27 07:10:41 UTC 2011

On 06/27/2011 12:30 AM, M. Williamson wrote:
> Some of these actually already have Wikipedias:
> 
> Meadow Mari
> Yakut (aka Sakha)
> Lak
> Balkar (aka Karachay-Balkar)
> Yiddish, Eastern (= "standard" Yiddish, "Western Yiddish" is the one we are
> missing but it has much fewer speakers; according to Ethnologue there are
> only 5,400 around the world)
> 
> In addition, in another message you stated that we probably had Wikipedias
> in every Sinitic language that was distinct enough from Mandarin to receive
> an own Wikipedia; Min Bei has 10.3 million speakers and does not have a
> Wikipedia and is definitely far removed from Mandarin; Xiang is also
> probably deserving of its own Wikipedia and has 30 million+ speakers.

Thanks for the corrections!

As for Han languages, because of the languages which you mentioned, I
intentionally left all of them. Obviously, they will be analyzed on
case-by-case basis.

But, Han languages are not endangered, China is fairly developed
country, their basic written language needs are covered by CJK
characters and fonts etc. If they want to have Wikipedia, it is likely
that they would get it, but it is not priority.

If we are talking about languages of China, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao)
languages, for example, should be more in focus, as some of them have
enough speakers to create viable Wikimedia projects if supported
(Chuanqiandian Cluster Miao has 1.4M of speakers).