Re: FW: RE: for next release notes

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 03:56:46PM -0600, David Lodge wrote:
> 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 years out of date, even for english (322 million) - this just about covers the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.

It also depends on what the figure means.

In the USA a number of people do not speak English, but eg Spanish.
I think something like 30 mill people speak Spanish there, but some of
these do speak English too. Same for Canada where some people do not
speak English, but they do speak French.

For Gnome the interesting figure is how many read the language.
Some parts of the polulation do not have the ability to read, such as
the 0 to 7 year old, and those who never learnt to read.
That is maybe 10 % of the population, for the USA maybe 25 mill people
or thereabout.

Best regards
Keld