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

[Boubakar Barry]

Are we going to waste time on this?

Yes, many people have challenges if communication is in English only.

But if AfriNIC makes the effort to translate all core documents and the
website into French (done already) and Arabic, we should be fine.

Actually, the majority of people in our community who speak Arabic, English
or French don't have these languages as native language.

If I can communicate in pulaar, wolof, francais, english, deutsch, etc.,
it's because I am open to other cultures and willing to reach out to the
people of these cultures. I won't be surprised that many of those who are
teaching us what we should do will be lost if we engage them in another
language than English, at least from the African perspective.

Again, from my perspective, if we manage to have core docs and the website
in Arabic, English and French, we should be fine.

Boubakar

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 9:45 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
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>
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