Peter Constable wrote on unicode@unicode.org:
> After considerable and unfortunate delay, the new Ethnologue site,
> including the online version of the 14th Edition, is at last
> available to
> the public: http://www.ethnologue.com/home.asp. There are
> still refinements
> being made, but all the basics are there and working.
Congratulations for the new edition!
I have immediately checked the page about Italy
(http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Italy), and I verified with
great satisfaction that the mistakes of the previous version have now been
corrected.
In the previous edition, the estimate for the various languages spoken in
Italy approximately summed up to the population of Italy. This was an absurd
result, because it did not take in account the fact that most Italians speak
both the national language AND a local language (or "dialect"). It also led
to an unrealistically low estimate for the Italian language itself.
In the 14th version, the sum of speakers for all languages is much greater
than the population of the country, about twice of it. This is a plausible
figure, which takes into account the widespread bilingualism of the
population.
Also, I notice that the number of speakers of Italian is nearly identical to
Ethnologue's evaluation of the literacy rate; this is also a plausible
figure, because teaching in Italy is generally in Italian (or in German, in
some areas, but with Italian as one of the main subjects).
This consolidation of Ethnologue's data for my own area increases
considerably my confidence in the data for other areas of the world.
_ Marco
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