

Only 4% of Languages Are Used Online - realusername
http://priceonomics.com/only-4-of-languages-are-used-online/

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wmil
One of the problems is that linguists care more about languages than people.
Turkey switched to the latin alphabet from an arabic script. They found it
easier to learn and it helped boost literacy rates.[1]

Minor languages die because they're a detriment to native speakers, it's not a
bad thing when they do.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_alphabet)

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dunstad
Here's a list of some of the most thriving languages, measured in the study by
their OS support: English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese (both Brazilian and European), Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (Bokmål),
Danish, Finnish, Russian, Polish, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified),
and Korean.

Taken from
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0077056#pone.0077056-Ad1)

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wvenable
It's hard for me imagine that there are 7,000 different languages spoken
around the world! There are only 195 countries so it seems like 7,000 is an
unsustainable number of languages. The number of languages "thriving" online
is 170 which, to me, feels like a reasonable number. Perhaps it's my English-
speaking hubris to think this way.

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gumby
> It's hard for me imagine that there are 7,000 different languages spoken
> around the world! ...Perhaps it's my English-speaking hubris to think this
> way.

Indeed it is. First of all, there are 7Bn people on the planet, and many
languages have a small number of speakers. Loosely, today, less technology,
the more languages (because there is less intercommunication). What we call
France used to have hundreds of not-particularly-mutually-comprehensible
languages until the Louis XIII and XIV made a point of eliminating them -- but
it took the television to pull it off. Likewise, incomprehensible English
dialects survived well into the 20th century.

In India there are _dozens_ of languages that have never had a written form
that gain an alphabet each year.

BTW What's a "language" and what's a "dialect" is a very political issue. It
was said in the 1800s that you could walk from Paris to Rome, with each
village speaking a dialect that its neighbors could understand, but by the
time you arrived you'd gone from French-speaking Paris to Italian-speaking
Rome. Also, politically, there is one "Chinese" language with other Chinese
languages called "dialects." As a kid I heard Mandarin and Cantonese daily,
and never would have called them the same languages, but I had neighbors who
would have virulently argued the opposite.

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Grue3
Seems suspicious that "not used online" languages are declared dead, whereas
it might as well be the case that they haven't been truly "born" on the
Internet yet.

The main reason is that the places with the greatest variety of languages also
happen to be poorly developed areas with lack of Internet access. As their
ability to access the Internet improves, the languages might find a way to
thrive (or be defeated by the overwhelming amount of foreign-language
content).

Another reason is poor Unicode/browser/font support for various languages.
Even some thriving languages suffer from it like Japanese with no vertical
writing and furigana support in most browsers. To say nothing of something
like Mongolian script. This might also be fixed, which will increase the
affected languages' usage on the Internet.

~~~
gizmo686
>no ... furigana support in most browsers

Chrome, IE, Safari and Opera have all supported the "ruby" tag, which is used
for furigana, for a while now. Firefox has finally added support in version
38, released in May.

Now, I can start complaining about the number of sites that misuse ruby and
break highlighting.

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3JPLW
That plot is terrible. I had assumed that it was butchered by the journalist…
but it's exactly the same in the paper. Which axis is the number of speakers?
What is the "real ratio"? I expected better from PLOS ONE.

~~~
thebelal
The axis are described in the text

> The x axis (log scaled) gives the number of speakers (plus one, so as not to
> make dead languages fall off the scale). The y axis, also log scaled, shows
> the adjusted wikipedia size.

As is the real ratio

> real ratio, defined as the number of ‘real’ pages divided by the total page
> count

Not sure why they couldn't put the above in the figure legend (or better yet
label the plot directly). I agree it is poorly done.

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elchief
4% being about 300 languages

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Bouncingsoul1
Is the context "digital" really important here, I hardly believe that
publication overall, analog and digital, happens in more than 300 languages,
or are there books, newspapers, magazines, roadsigns in 6000+ languages?

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floridaguy01
these are the languages most people will speak in 100 years based on my
predictions: English, Mandarin, A spanish portuegues hybrid language, Whatever
they mainly speak in india, Arabic, and Japanese

Most countries will pick up english or chinese for their official language.
Most european countries will lose their native language due to the influx of
immigrants polluting their culture.

