Re: Populations

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

On 11/03/2006, at 6:51 AM, Danilo Åegan wrote:

> Today at 5:24, Clytie Siddall wrote:
>
> > What puzzles me is where this data comes from. I know last time we
> > did the Release Notes, I queried the number of Vietnamese speakers,
> > since the last official census in Vietnam reported a much larger
> > figure than that in the release notes. I think it bugs any user group
> > when information about them is seriously inaccurate.
>
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=vie
>
> Note what people usually tell you is the number of citizens, not first
> language speakers.  And, if we start counting second language speakers
> as well, we'd get pretty large figures for English, Spanish, French,
> German and other popular foreign languages.

I think the Ethnologue figures for my country have the same problem  
as the Thai figures: yes, we do have minority cultural groups, and  
they probably represent the missing figures, but the national  
language, used for government, education and software, is Vietnamese.  
Using this figure actually disadvantages these already disadvantaged  
groups, since it does not represent them.

Sure, when someone finally volunteers to translate software into all  
these very local languages, that will be good for that local culture.  
But they will still be reading and writing the bulk of their  
information in Vietnamese.

The census figures represent the number of people who filled in that  
census (in Vietnamese ;) ), the number of people living in that  
country who use that language for daily information access and  
dispersal. I think those figures are more appropriate to representing  
the number of people who will use our localized software when they  
get access to it.

(Thanks, Theppitak, for clearing up the discrepancy between the  
Ethnologue figures and the census. I couldn't work out where those  
figures had gone.)

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhÃm  
Viát hÃa phán mám tá do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN