Language support summary/discussion

[Thibaut Varene]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 15:13:55 +0100, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody!
> 
> In yesterday's meeting we had a rather lengthy and multithreaded
> discussion about language packs. This is a summarizing of the topic
> and an invitation to discuss this further since many questions are
> still open.
> 
> (1) Which language packs should be shipped on the install CD?
> 
> According to [1], the most widely spoken languages in the world are:
> 
>       Language (#native speakers)       langpack size
>    1. Chinese* (937,132,000)            3379218
>    2. Spanish (332,000,000)             3181222
>    3. English (322,000,000)             2654930
>    4. Bengali (189,000,000)              610776
>    5. Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)           513176
>    6. Arabic* (174,950,000)              747176
>    7. Portuguese (170,000,000)          4018494
>    8. Russian (170,000,000)             2217870
>    9. Japanese (125,000,000)            2556682
>   10. German (98,000,000)               3174524
>   11. French* (79,572,000)              3306650

A quick reaction on these figures: They are completely biased. You are
only accounting native speakers here, as noted. Looking further on the
webpage you mentioned shows interesting data:

"[...], if you add the secondary speaker populations to the primary
speaker populations, you get the following (and I believe more
accurate) list:
(number of speakers in parentheses)

   1. Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
   2. English (480 million)
   3. Spanish (320 million)
   4. Russian (285 million)
   5. French (265 million)
   6. Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
   7. Arabic (221 million)
   8. Portuguese (188 million)
   9. Bengali (185 million)
  10. Japanese (133 million)
  11. German (109 million)"

And:

"The following is a list of these languages in terms of the number of
countries where each is spoken.  The number that follows is the total
number of countries that use that language (from Weber, 1997):

   1. English (115)
   2. French (35)
   3. Arabic (24)
   4. Spanish (20)
   5. Russian (16)
   6. German (9)
   7. Mandarin (5)
   8. Portuguese (5)
   9. Hindi/Urdu (2)
  10. Bengali (1)
  11. Japanese (1)"

These figures are IMHO much more relevant to the question "how broad
our language support will be if we include that language package".
Taking for example Africa, French and English are probably the two
most commonly shared languages out there, for well-known historical
reasons...

Looking at native speakers only is meaningless: you'll get much more
people happy if you look at what languages they "also" know (here
again Africa comes to mind), hence the second set of figures. The most
important ones are the cumulated primary+secondary speakers I think,
though the number of countries helps showing how much country you'll
help by adding a language set.

HTH

PS: I hope you understand why ripping off French would be a bad idea, btw? ;o)

-- 
Thibaut VARENE
The PA/Linux Team
http://www.pateam.org/