Only 4% of languages are used online

http://priceonomics.com/only-4-of-languages-are-used-online/

by taofu • 13 years ago

67 55 13 years ago

elwell• 13 years ago

That statistic is somewhat misleading. Or, at least, not very meaningful. A more meaningful statistic would acknowledge the different "weights" that certain languages carry (i.e., "how many people use it").

diziet2• 13 years ago

We parsed a lot of the data from App reviews (about 100 million) in different countries. Languages used are predominantly skewered toward english or other european languages. For example, in Israel, 51% of all reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew.

Writeup on major countries: http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-s...

minimax• 13 years ago

That's pretty cool analysis. Do you think the high proportion of English relative to other non-native languages could be related to the general affluence of Apple users? It would be interesting to see how these ratios stack up relative to the languages used in reviews on some of the Android app stores in their respective countries. Thanks for sharing.

diziet2• 13 years ago

I suspect the affluence of smartphone users in general is more selected towards those that can speak/write english. Also, most apps are not localized to native languages, and so the people that use apps are exposed to english more often. It's much harder to get reviews on Android, especially for different countries.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

TrainedMonkey• 13 years ago

That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist.

Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing.

Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost.

Truth is always somewhere in between.

kszx• 13 years ago

Many regional languages and dialects have been lost due to the efforts of nationalists, not globalists. Nationalists favour the use of a single language for all citizens of a country.

tnbd• 13 years ago

"Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing."

This is wrong, as there being more languages does not mean everyone is monolingual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

"Truth is always somewhere in between." What if I claim it isn't?

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

Truth is always somewhere in between.

Either that's totally wrong (implies equal weighting), or it's a near-tautology (only false if one position is less than 100% accurate).

jjoonathan• 13 years ago

Truth is always somewhere in between.

Good thing we agree about globalization otherwise I'd grab one of your goalposts and run with it ;)

melling3• 13 years ago

196 countries and 240 languages are represented online. The other 5000+ languages being used aren't national languages.

PavlovsCat3• 13 years ago

Loss of a language also often means a slightly unique way of seeing the world and thinking/talking about it is lost. Many languages have cool or weird features [1], and I care about that even though I can't communicate with speakers of those languages and therefore will never know the difference. I don't care about the national heritage of others, it's theirs - I care about diversity for the sake of it existing, not for the sake of me experiencing it. If we all thought the same stuff in the same ways, without any barriers, that would be much worse than having disconnected pockets of diversity, IMHO.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYlVJlmjLEc

mildtrepidation• 13 years ago

Why does it have to be either? At best it's convenient, at worst it doesn't effect you. No need to make a value judgment. :)

wobbleblob2• 13 years ago

As a native speaker of a geographically confined language, I've come to the conclusion that a small language can be a prison. Here, in the small corner of the world where I just happened to be born, I understand everything. Every nuance, every idiom, even speech with a heavy regional accent.

As soon as I move 100 miles in any direction, this clarity disappears. Despite my decent grasp of English, I miss things. It is like my verbal IQ is lower, and I have become hard of hearing. I don't understand slang, and regional accents are difficult to make out. Every mispronunciation or malapropism is a risk of ridicule or misunderstanding.

Linguistic diversity may seem nice in theory, but not for the sake of performing a of quaint tribal dance for tourist dollars. It is simply undeniably more useful to be a native speaker of a major language. I'm trying to raise my kids as native speakers of English, to prevent them from being trapped the way their old man was. As far as I'm concerned, minority languages are better off going the way of Latin or Etruscan.

ars• 13 years ago

I don't think wikipedia is such a great way to decide on a language. A better way is things like chat messages, but they are harder to analyze.

jliechti1• 13 years ago

I'd bet a large portion of these languages don't even have official written languages. Some of the Chinese languages have tens of millions of native speakers and even they have no standardized way of writing their languages. When you start getting into languages that are specific to a tribe or very local area, the odds seem pretty low.

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

And what percentage of people in the world uses one of the languages in that 4% as their primary language? I'm guessing it's a really large percentage, probably a majority of the world's population. It's not really useful to look at the percent of languages when they vary in the number of speakers by so much (and there's a long tail of languages with a vanishingly small number of speakers).

vilhelm_s• 13 years ago

Indeed. To get a rough idea I added up the first table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... , it seems that about 85% of the world population are native speakers of one of the top-100 (top 1.6%) languages.

autarch• 13 years ago

It's not clear from the Wikipedia list if the language categories are mutually exclusive. For example, it seems quite likely that nearly everyone who speaks the Wu, Jin, and Min Nian Chinese family languages also speaks Mandarin.

I'm not even sure what it means to say that Min Nian is the native language for anyone in Taiwan. Sure, lots of people learn it at home but anyone under 60 is going to be just as fluent in Mandarin.

jacobwcarlson• 13 years ago

The cool thing about the Internet is that if you're curious about some data you can analyze it on your own. Perhaps you would show us what you've found? And what impact that's had on how you conduct business?

melling3• 13 years ago

I guess the title "Only 240 languages are used online" doesn't sound like a problem? That probably represents 5 or 6 of 7 billion people?

I think the world should move towards even fewer languages than 240. However, it would be very sad if we didn't capture the complete grammar, vocabulary, etc. of those other languages before they die, along with lots of audio, to preserve them.

CaveTech• 13 years ago

You're promoting both the killing and preserving of languages in the same paragraph, seems a bit misguided. Surely if they're worth documenting, then its worth trying to preserve their use as well.

Surely the world should be moving to a place where it doesn't matter what language the source is, at least online. A fully competent Google translate would seamlessly allow everyone to communicate without destroying culture in the process.

nitrogen• 13 years ago

Why promote the use of obsolete technology (including language), when it can be satisfactorily preserved in museums?

melling3• 13 years ago

I think the majority of the 6000 languages are spoken by very few people. Look at the number of languages spoken in India, for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_...

Is there a benefit to having all those languages where less than 100,000 people speak the language?

astine• 13 years ago

If it were possible to translate every concept or expression, transparently from any language into any other, there wouldn't be any real reason to have more than one language. Or, in other words, if the only differences between languages are cosmetic, different words and slightly different grammar, then there would be more to gain from being able to communicate without using a machine as an intermediary than from keeping the old phonemes (which will eventually be replaced anyway) in use.

icebraining• 13 years ago

That reminds me of William Temple Hornaday's, who killed a whole herd of Buffalos to preserve them.

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=12-P13-0002...

wallnerm• 13 years ago

I would rather focus on the many opportunities technology and the internet offers to preserve those 6000+ languages that are currently not being used online. It's not very bold to say that technology will prevent them from disappearing completely unlike many languages in history that were not persevered.

Jun8• 13 years ago

"A language’s Wikipedia presence was one of the most important indicators of its ability to leap into the digital age."

Which made me curios to search for and find Vicipaedia http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima, it's in the 10k+ article category.

bitops• 13 years ago

These types of discussion about language always reminds me of http://www.economist.com/node/15108609 which I find a fascinating read.

kimonos• 13 years ago

I really agree on this..

Anon84• 13 years ago

And here is a map of where they are used on Twitter

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/qianz/MapTwitterLanguage/v1/inde...

M4v3R• 13 years ago

The www.jw.org website (Jehovah's Witnesses website) is translated to 316 languages atm, which is on par with the article's claim (170 actively used + 140 borderline cases). You can disagree with the site's message, but it tries to do a good job into sending the message to people all around the world in different languages. In comparison though, JW publications are printed in 600+ languages, so there's still lot to do for the website.

Edit: Going into "publications" section, there's a picker which lets you select a language from total of 538.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

I hope the research cited is better, because the article makes a complete hash of mixing interface language, script and language actually used to communicate. All of these are thrown together as "use of language on digital stuff".

It's quite common around the world to use an interface in language X (because the options are limited) but communicate in their own language. (I personally do it all the time, so much so that I prefer an English interface over one in my own language for the sake of consistency.)

Lack of support for certain kinds of script may be an issue, but that never becomes clear from the article. If the data is heavily based on the formal support for languages (instead of actual usage) then it's seriously skewed. And even if it isn't, the article doesn't tell us where the actual problem is.

knowitall• 13 years ago

Are most languages really a big loss? I suppose there are some interesting variations in grammar, but what else? What can we learn from some obscure languages?

CmonDev• 13 years ago

Useless things die out - it's a natural process.

pbhjpbhj3• 13 years ago

Things which aren't useless also die out.

PeterisP• 13 years ago

Well, for languages the main way for dying out is when ~2 generations of their population decide that this language is useless for them and the vast majority choose not to use it anymore.

There are exceptions like genocide and forced assimilation of conquered nations; but these refer to extermination of languages/cultures, not the much more widespread issue of them simply dying out through disuse and voluntary assimilation.

noarchy• 13 years ago

As someone who lives in an area where language is extremely political, and government is already involved in language-related legislation in day-to-day life, I worry that this is a potential vector for more government intrusion on the Internet. The excuses are practically built-in, from the perspective of the nationalists.

hrkristian• 13 years ago

La oss håpe dine landsmenn ikke tar til internett med sitt eget språk der det ikke passer.

NatCrodo• 13 years ago

I wouldn't wonder why there is only 4%. There are thousands and thousands of languages allover the world.

Only 4% of languages are used online

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