Edward:
>One of the popular almanacs used to have a single page list of
the languages with the most speakers, and may still do so. I
believe that
Unicode now covers all of the scripts listed, which may well
cover
the primary language of 99%...
A minor quibble: 1% of 6 billion would be 60 million. I think
I've heard figures (I'm not positive -- I could probably find
this out from the Ethnologue, but don't want to take the time
now) that there are something like 350 million speakers of
unwritten languages. If that's true, then you could say no more
than 94%. (Mind you, a significant proportion, though by no
means all, of those 350M also speak a second language the
writing system of which is covered by Unicode.) Add in
languages which have writing systems that are not yet fully
covered by Unicode (scripts yet to be added, or incomplete
coverage - e.g. Iranian Kurdish, as was pointed out yesterday),
and that comes down a little more. I have no idea by how much,
but I'd be surprised if it wasn't another 1 - 3%.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:58 EDT