6 ms·

Only 4% of languages are used online

67 points by taofu 13y ago

knowitall 13y ago
Are most languages really a big loss? I suppose there are some interesting variations in grammar, but what else? What can we learn from some obscure languages?
elwell 13y ago
That statistic is somewhat misleading. Or, at least, not very meaningful. A more meaningful statistic would acknowledge the different "weights" that certain languages carry (i.e., "how many people use it").
diziet 13y ago
We parsed a lot of the data from App reviews (about 100 million) in different countries. Languages used are predominantly skewered toward english or other european languages. For example, in Israel, 51% of all reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew. Writeup on major countries: http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-store-reviews-can-tell-you-about-foreign-language-app-users/ http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-s...
- minimax 13y ago
  That's pretty cool analysis. Do you think the high proportion of English relative to other non-native languages could be related to the general affluence of Apple users? It would be interesting to see how these ratios stack up relative to the languages used in reviews on some of the Android app stores in their respective countries. Thanks for sharing.
  - diziet 13y ago
    I suspect the affluence of smartphone users in general is more selected towards those that can speak/write english. Also, most apps are not localized to native languages, and so the people that use apps are exposed to english more often. It's much harder to get reviews on Android, especially for different countries.
adamnemecek 13y ago
I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
- TrainedMonkey 13y ago
  That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
  - melling 13y ago
    196 countries and 240 languages are represented online. The other 5000+ languages being used aren't national languages.
  - kszx 13y ago
    Many regional languages and dialects have been lost due to the efforts of nationalists, not globalists. Nationalists favour the use of a single language for all citizens of a country.
  - tnbd 13y ago
    "Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing." This is wrong, as there being more languages does not mean everyone is monolingual. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca "Truth is always somewhere in between." What if I claim it isn't?
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >"Truth is always somewhere in between." What if I claim it isn't? Then, axiomatically, truth is somewhere in between "possibly being near some extreme" and being "somewhere in between". So it's not in between anymore...
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    >Truth is always somewhere in between. Either that's totally wrong (implies equal weighting), or it's a near-tautology (only false if one position is less than 100% accurate).
ars 13y ago
I don't think wikipedia is such a great way to decide on a language. A better way is things like chat messages, but they are harder to analyze.
jliechti1 13y ago
I'd bet a large portion of these languages don't even have official written languages. Some of the Chinese languages have tens of millions of native speakers and even they have no standardized way of writing their languages. When you start getting into languages that are specific to a tribe or very local area, the odds seem pretty low.
w1ntermute 13y ago
And what percentage of people in the world uses one of the languages in that 4% as their primary language? I'm guessing it's a really large percentage, probably a majority of the world's population. It's not really useful to look at the percent of languages when they vary in the number of speakers by so much (and there's a long tail of languages with a vanishingly small number of speakers).
- vilhelm_s 13y ago
  Indeed. To get a rough idea I added up the first table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... , it seems that about 85% of the world population are native speakers of one of the top-100 (top 1.6%) languages.
  - autarch 13y ago
    It's not clear from the Wikipedia list if the language categories are mutually exclusive. For example, it seems quite likely that nearly everyone who speaks the Wu, Jin, and Min Nian Chinese family languages also speaks Mandarin. I'm not even sure what it means to say that Min Nian is the native language for anyone in Taiwan. Sure, lots of people learn it at home but anyone under 60 is going to be just as fluent in Mandarin.
    - elliotlai 13y ago
      The first language I learned is Min Nan, though my Min Nan is not as fluent as my Mandarin now, I still consider it my mother tongue.
- jacobwcarlson 13y ago
  The cool thing about the Internet is that if you're curious about some data you can analyze it on your own. Perhaps you would show us what you've found? And what impact that's had on how you conduct business?
melling 13y ago
I guess the title "Only 240 languages are used online" doesn't sound like a problem? That probably represents 5 or 6 of 7 billion people? I think the world should move towards even fewer languages than 240. However, it would be very sad if we didn't capture the complete grammar, vocabulary, etc. of those other languages before they die, along with lots of audio, to preserve them.
- CaveTech 13y ago
  You're promoting both the killing and preserving of languages in the same paragraph, seems a bit misguided. Surely if they're worth documenting, then its worth trying to preserve their use as well. Surely the world should be moving to a place where it doesn't matter what language the source is, at least online. A fully competent Google translate would seamlessly allow everyone to communicate without destroying culture in the process.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Why promote the use of obsolete technology (including language), when it can be satisfactorily preserved in museums?
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      If it doesn't happen the same as it happen to Alexandria's Library, that is.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Because "satisfactorily preserved" and "museum" are contradictory for a language. A spoken language is a living thing -- and it carries with it the patina of all those that have used it, their stories and how they shaped the language in return etc. Relegating to some museum excibits (that noone will care about, let's be honest) is like being satisfied by a polaroid of your significant other, instead of him/her.
      - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
wallnerm 13y ago
I would rather focus on the many opportunities technology and the internet offers to preserve those 6000+ languages that are currently not being used online. It's not very bold to say that technology will prevent them from disappearing completely unlike many languages in history that were not persevered.
Jun8 13y ago
"A language’s Wikipedia presence was one of the most important indicators of its ability to leap into the digital age." Which made me curios to search for and find Vicipaedia http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima, it's in the 10k+ article category.
bitops 13y ago
These types of discussion about language always reminds me of http://www.economist.com/node/15108609 http://www.economist.com/node/15108609 which I find a fascinating read.
kimonos 13y ago
I really agree on this..
Anon84 13y ago
And here is a map of where they are used on Twitter http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/qianz/MapTwitterLanguage/v1/index.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/qianz/MapTwitterLanguage/v1/inde...
M4v3R 13y ago
The www.jw.org website (Jehovah's Witnesses website) is translated to 316 languages atm, which is on par with the article's claim (170 actively used + 140 borderline cases). You can disagree with the site's message, but it tries to do a good job into sending the message to people all around the world in different languages. In comparison though, JW publications are printed in 600+ languages, so there's still lot to do for the website. Edit: Going into "publications" section, there's a picker which lets you select a language from total of 538.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
I hope the research cited is better, because the article makes a complete hash of mixing interface language, script and language actually used to communicate. All of these are thrown together as "use of language on digital stuff". It's quite common around the world to use an interface in language X (because the options are limited) but communicate in their own language. (I personally do it all the time, so much so that I prefer an English interface over one in my own language for the sake of consistency.) Lack of support for certain kinds of script may be an issue, but that never becomes clear from the article. If the data is heavily based on the formal support for languages (instead of actual usage) then it's seriously skewed. And even if it isn't, the article doesn't tell us where the actual problem is.
CmonDev 13y ago
Useless things die out - it's a natural process.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  Things which aren't useless also die out.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    Well, for languages the main way for dying out is when ~2 generations of their population decide that this language is useless for them and the vast majority choose not to use it anymore. There are exceptions like genocide and forced assimilation of conquered nations; but these refer to extermination of languages/cultures, not the much more widespread issue of them simply dying out through disuse and voluntary assimilation.
noarchy 13y ago
As someone who lives in an area where language is extremely political, and government is already involved in language-related legislation in day-to-day life, I worry that this is a potential vector for more government intrusion on the Internet. The excuses are practically built-in, from the perspective of the nationalists.
- hrkristian 13y ago
  La oss håpe dine landsmenn ikke tar til internett med sitt eget språk der det ikke passer.
NatCrodo 13y ago
I wouldn't wonder why there is only 4%. There are thousands and thousands of languages allover the world.

67 points by taofu 13y ago

Are most languages really a big loss? I suppose there are some interesting variations in grammar, but what else? What can we learn from some obscure languages?

elwell 13y ago

That statistic is somewhat misleading. Or, at least, not very meaningful. A more meaningful statistic would acknowledge the different "weights" that certain languages carry (i.e., "how many people use it").

diziet 13y ago

We parsed a lot of the data from App reviews (about 100 million) in different countries. Languages used are predominantly skewered toward english or other european languages. For example, in Israel, 51% of all reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew. Writeup on major countries: http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-store-reviews-can-tell-you-about-foreign-language-app-users/ http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-s...

minimax 13y ago
That's pretty cool analysis. Do you think the high proportion of English relative to other non-native languages could be related to the general affluence of Apple users? It would be interesting to see how these ratios stack up relative to the languages used in reviews on some of the Android app stores in their respective countries. Thanks for sharing.
- diziet 13y ago
  I suspect the affluence of smartphone users in general is more selected towards those that can speak/write english. Also, most apps are not localized to native languages, and so the people that use apps are exposed to english more often. It's much harder to get reviews on Android, especially for different countries.

adamnemecek 13y ago

I can't decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago
That depends on whether you are globalist or nationalist. Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing. Nationalist - bad, loss of language means some part of cultural heritage lost. Truth is always somewhere in between.
- melling 13y ago
  196 countries and 240 languages are represented online. The other 5000+ languages being used aren't national languages.
- kszx 13y ago
  Many regional languages and dialects have been lost due to the efforts of nationalists, not globalists. Nationalists favour the use of a single language for all citizens of a country.
- tnbd 13y ago
  "Globalist - good, less languages - less barriers. Good for international commerce and knowledge sharing." This is wrong, as there being more languages does not mean everyone is monolingual. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca "Truth is always somewhere in between." What if I claim it isn't?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >"Truth is always somewhere in between." What if I claim it isn't? Then, axiomatically, truth is somewhere in between "possibly being near some extreme" and being "somewhere in between". So it's not in between anymore...
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  >Truth is always somewhere in between. Either that's totally wrong (implies equal weighting), or it's a near-tautology (only false if one position is less than 100% accurate).

ars 13y ago

I don't think wikipedia is such a great way to decide on a language. A better way is things like chat messages, but they are harder to analyze.

jliechti1 13y ago

I'd bet a large portion of these languages don't even have official written languages. Some of the Chinese languages have tens of millions of native speakers and even they have no standardized way of writing their languages. When you start getting into languages that are specific to a tribe or very local area, the odds seem pretty low.

w1ntermute 13y ago

And what percentage of people in the world uses one of the languages in that 4% as their primary language? I'm guessing it's a really large percentage, probably a majority of the world's population. It's not really useful to look at the percent of languages when they vary in the number of speakers by so much (and there's a long tail of languages with a vanishingly small number of speakers).

vilhelm_s 13y ago
Indeed. To get a rough idea I added up the first table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... , it seems that about 85% of the world population are native speakers of one of the top-100 (top 1.6%) languages.
- autarch 13y ago
  It's not clear from the Wikipedia list if the language categories are mutually exclusive. For example, it seems quite likely that nearly everyone who speaks the Wu, Jin, and Min Nian Chinese family languages also speaks Mandarin. I'm not even sure what it means to say that Min Nian is the native language for anyone in Taiwan. Sure, lots of people learn it at home but anyone under 60 is going to be just as fluent in Mandarin.
  - elliotlai 13y ago
    The first language I learned is Min Nan, though my Min Nan is not as fluent as my Mandarin now, I still consider it my mother tongue.
jacobwcarlson 13y ago
The cool thing about the Internet is that if you're curious about some data you can analyze it on your own. Perhaps you would show us what you've found? And what impact that's had on how you conduct business?

melling 13y ago

I guess the title "Only 240 languages are used online" doesn't sound like a problem? That probably represents 5 or 6 of 7 billion people? I think the world should move towards even fewer languages than 240. However, it would be very sad if we didn't capture the complete grammar, vocabulary, etc. of those other languages before they die, along with lots of audio, to preserve them.

CaveTech 13y ago
You're promoting both the killing and preserving of languages in the same paragraph, seems a bit misguided. Surely if they're worth documenting, then its worth trying to preserve their use as well. Surely the world should be moving to a place where it doesn't matter what language the source is, at least online. A fully competent Google translate would seamlessly allow everyone to communicate without destroying culture in the process.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Why promote the use of obsolete technology (including language), when it can be satisfactorily preserved in museums?
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    If it doesn't happen the same as it happen to Alexandria's Library, that is.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Because "satisfactorily preserved" and "museum" are contradictory for a language. A spoken language is a living thing -- and it carries with it the patina of all those that have used it, their stories and how they shaped the language in return etc. Relegating to some museum excibits (that noone will care about, let's be honest) is like being satisfied by a polaroid of your significant other, instead of him/her.
    - pbhjpbhj 13y ago

wallnerm 13y ago

I would rather focus on the many opportunities technology and the internet offers to preserve those 6000+ languages that are currently not being used online. It's not very bold to say that technology will prevent them from disappearing completely unlike many languages in history that were not persevered.

Jun8 13y ago

"A language’s Wikipedia presence was one of the most important indicators of its ability to leap into the digital age." Which made me curios to search for and find Vicipaedia http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipaedia:Pagina_prima, it's in the 10k+ article category.

bitops 13y ago

These types of discussion about language always reminds me of http://www.economist.com/node/15108609 http://www.economist.com/node/15108609 which I find a fascinating read.

kimonos 13y ago

I really agree on this..

Anon84 13y ago

And here is a map of where they are used on Twitter http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/qianz/MapTwitterLanguage/v1/index.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/qianz/MapTwitterLanguage/v1/inde...

M4v3R 13y ago

The www.jw.org website (Jehovah's Witnesses website) is translated to 316 languages atm, which is on par with the article's claim (170 actively used + 140 borderline cases). You can disagree with the site's message, but it tries to do a good job into sending the message to people all around the world in different languages. In comparison though, JW publications are printed in 600+ languages, so there's still lot to do for the website. Edit: Going into "publications" section, there's a picker which lets you select a language from total of 538.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

I hope the research cited is better, because the article makes a complete hash of mixing interface language, script and language actually used to communicate. All of these are thrown together as "use of language on digital stuff". It's quite common around the world to use an interface in language X (because the options are limited) but communicate in their own language. (I personally do it all the time, so much so that I prefer an English interface over one in my own language for the sake of consistency.) Lack of support for certain kinds of script may be an issue, but that never becomes clear from the article. If the data is heavily based on the formal support for languages (instead of actual usage) then it's seriously skewed. And even if it isn't, the article doesn't tell us where the actual problem is.

CmonDev 13y ago

Useless things die out - it's a natural process.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
Things which aren't useless also die out.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Well, for languages the main way for dying out is when ~2 generations of their population decide that this language is useless for them and the vast majority choose not to use it anymore. There are exceptions like genocide and forced assimilation of conquered nations; but these refer to extermination of languages/cultures, not the much more widespread issue of them simply dying out through disuse and voluntary assimilation.

noarchy 13y ago

As someone who lives in an area where language is extremely political, and government is already involved in language-related legislation in day-to-day life, I worry that this is a potential vector for more government intrusion on the Internet. The excuses are practically built-in, from the perspective of the nationalists.

hrkristian 13y ago
La oss håpe dine landsmenn ikke tar til internett med sitt eget språk der det ikke passer.

NatCrodo 13y ago

I wouldn't wonder why there is only 4%. There are thousands and thousands of languages allover the world.