Only 4% of Languages Are Used Online

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

by realusername • 11 years ago

19 11 11 years ago

elchief• 11 years ago

4% being about 300 languages

3JPLW• 11 years ago

That plot is terrible. I had assumed that it was butchered by the journalist… but it's exactly the same in the paper. Which axis is the number of speakers? What is the "real ratio"? I expected better from PLOS ONE.

thebelal• 11 years ago

The axis are described in the text

The x axis (log scaled) gives the number of speakers (plus one, so as not to make dead languages fall off the scale). The y axis, also log scaled, shows the adjusted wikipedia size.

As is the real ratio

real ratio, defined as the number of ‘real’ pages divided by the total page count

Not sure why they couldn't put the above in the figure legend (or better yet label the plot directly). I agree it is poorly done.

dunstad• 11 years ago

Here's a list of some of the most thriving languages, measured in the study by their OS support: English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (both Brazilian and European), Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (Bokmål), Danish, Finnish, Russian, Polish, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), and Korean.

Taken from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

wvenable• 11 years ago

It's hard for me imagine that there are 7,000 different languages spoken around the world! There are only 195 countries so it seems like 7,000 is an unsustainable number of languages. The number of languages "thriving" online is 170 which, to me, feels like a reasonable number. Perhaps it's my English-speaking hubris to think this way.

gumby• 11 years ago

It's hard for me imagine that there are 7,000 different languages spoken around the world! ...Perhaps it's my English-speaking hubris to think this way.

Indeed it is. First of all, there are 7Bn people on the planet, and many languages have a small number of speakers. Loosely, today, less technology, the more languages (because there is less intercommunication). What we call France used to have hundreds of not-particularly-mutually-comprehensible languages until the Louis XIII and XIV made a point of eliminating them -- but it took the television to pull it off. Likewise, incomprehensible English dialects survived well into the 20th century.

In India there are dozens of languages that have never had a written form that gain an alphabet each year.

BTW What's a "language" and what's a "dialect" is a very political issue. It was said in the 1800s that you could walk from Paris to Rome, with each village speaking a dialect that its neighbors could understand, but by the time you arrived you'd gone from French-speaking Paris to Italian-speaking Rome. Also, politically, there is one "Chinese" language with other Chinese languages called "dialects." As a kid I heard Mandarin and Cantonese daily, and never would have called them the same languages, but I had neighbors who would have virulently argued the opposite.

wmil• 11 years ago

One of the problems is that linguists care more about languages than people. Turkey switched to the latin alphabet from an arabic script. They found it easier to learn and it helped boost literacy rates.[1]

Minor languages die because they're a detriment to native speakers, it's not a bad thing when they do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet

Grue3• 11 years ago

Seems suspicious that "not used online" languages are declared dead, whereas it might as well be the case that they haven't been truly "born" on the Internet yet.

The main reason is that the places with the greatest variety of languages also happen to be poorly developed areas with lack of Internet access. As their ability to access the Internet improves, the languages might find a way to thrive (or be defeated by the overwhelming amount of foreign-language content).

Another reason is poor Unicode/browser/font support for various languages. Even some thriving languages suffer from it like Japanese with no vertical writing and furigana support in most browsers. To say nothing of something like Mongolian script. This might also be fixed, which will increase the affected languages' usage on the Internet.

gizmo686• 11 years ago

no ... furigana support in most browsers

Chrome, IE, Safari and Opera have all supported the "ruby" tag, which is used for furigana, for a while now. Firefox has finally added support in version 38, released in May.

Now, I can start complaining about the number of sites that misuse ruby and break highlighting.

Bouncingsoul1• 11 years ago

Is the context "digital" really important here, I hardly believe that publication overall, analog and digital, happens in more than 300 languages, or are there books, newspapers, magazines, roadsigns in 6000+ languages?

floridaguy01• 11 years ago

these are the languages most people will speak in 100 years based on my predictions: English, Mandarin, A spanish portuegues hybrid language, Whatever they mainly speak in india, Arabic, and Japanese

Most countries will pick up english or chinese for their official language. Most european countries will lose their native language due to the influx of immigrants polluting their culture.

Only 4% of Languages Are Used Online

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