Re: Bug in the .pot file

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sÃn 2005-03-06 klockan 17:37 +0100 skrev ÐÑÐÐÐÐÐ ÐÐÐÐÐ:
> Danilo Åegan wrote:
> 
> > This is about native language speakers, not citizenship.
> >
> >Also, that can't be true (you cannot be that precise, since someone
> >must have died, and someone must have been born since that estimate
> >was done :).  This is just an illustration of the types of problems
> >one might have with determining "real" number of speakers.
> >
> >I applied the same rules for Serbian (10M is not only from Serbia,
> >it's including Serbia, Montenegro and Republic of Srpska, meaning we
> >didn't count Kosovo population, and it's *very* imprecise: the true
> >figure might have been 9M, but it might have been 11M as wellâI don't
> >know and I don't care).
> 
> I agree. But all of the 2 million citizens are speaking macedonian. It's 
> the same with the hungarian minority in Northern Serbia or any other 
> country that has other nationalities, they all speak/use the country's 
> official language. I thought that the numbers for all languages were 
> based on those facts.

If you think about it, the only reasonable count and the only really
interesting figure in this respect is people's native language (their
mother tongue). Otherwise, people would be counted multiple times, once
for every language they happen to speak as well besides their mother
tongue. And double counting doesn't make the statistics more useful,
only more complicated.

Among other things, English would, if all people who have it as a second
language were counted as well, end up well over the 341 millions it
currently has (probably more than a billion I guess).

So the figures are for native speakers only, and most likely the figure
will diverge from the number of citizens in your country. Either because
of minorities in the country that don't have your language as their
mother tongue, and because there may be groups of people outside of your
country that still have your language as their first language. So it
goes both ways, but the figure is probably not the same as the number of
citizens in the country.


Christian