[Community-Discuss] Target large communities (was: Community-Discuss Digest, Vol 252, Issue 1)

[Owen DeLong]

If we’re looking for liguistic priority, perhaps we should focus on demographics by popluation…

This is my best attempt to incorporate both native and non-native speaker statistics. Reliable sources for the information are difficult to find and it took multiple sources using inconsistent data formats to attempt to compile the list.

Sources included a variety of wikipedia pages and other google searched locations.

I’m the first to admit this is not a scientific survey and may have issues with accuracy.

In order, the top 10 are:

English (196M)
Arabic (140MM)
French (120MM)
Swahili or Kiswahili (100MM)
Hausa (70MM)
Berber (56MM)
Yoruba (28MM)
Oromo (26MM)
Amharic (22MM)
Igbo (18MM)

Total: 776MM

So the top 10 languages would cover roughly 15/16ths of the population.
If we move cover the top 5, we get 626MM or roughly 3/4 of the population.
The top 3 (English, Arabic, French) will cover 456MM or roughly 1/2 of the population.

I do find it interesting that the first African language comes in at number 4.

Owen

> On Jan 16, 2018, at 07:58 , sm+afrinic at elandsys.com wrote:
> 
> Hi Mohammed,
> At 06:24 AM 16-01-2018, mohammed at ntc.gov.sd wrote:
>> I believe If we want to rebalance the language gap we have to target large communities and reach the largest segment of them. Arabic-speaking African countries are more than ten countries. So, it's of high importance that the site should be translated into Arabic to ensure greater access to the community. It's worth mentioning that the main reason why Arab don't participate in AfriNIC or any other ICT-related event is the language.
>> As to who is going to do the translation, we can ask help from Arab volunteers. I, myself, would be very happy to participate in the translation process.
> 
> Thank you for providing the above input.  I wondered why the participation from Arabic-speaking African countries was relatively low.
> 
> Regards,
> S. Moonesamy 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Community-Discuss mailing list
> Community-Discuss at afrinic.net
> https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo/community-discuss