Re: FW: RE: for next release notes

[David Lodge <dave cirt net>]

Quoting Francesco Marletta <francesco marletta tiscali it>:
> Why the Italian language is reported as
> 27        ITALIAN        Italy        ?x'37,000,000'
> ???
>Italy's population is more than 50million people, so how it can be  only
>37 million people that speak italian?

To be honest the figures look pretty low, even bearing in mind that they are 8
years out of date, even for english (322 million) - this just about covers the
UK and the USA (60 million and 260 respectively), but is not high enough for
Eire, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc.

It also looks like it doesn't take non-native languages into account either (as
this would take all those who can speak a dialect of English up).

It also doesn't provide enough of an estimation of dialectial split - e.g.
British English vs American.

So interesting, but not really exact enough to be useful.

dave