[LINK] Arabic and the net
Kim Holburn
kim at holburn.net
Tue Dec 15 19:10:13 AEDT 2009
On 2009/Dec/15, at 1:33 AM, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 09:45 AM 15/12/2009, Roger Clarke wrote:
>
>> [I failed to quickly find a table of languages showing estimated
>> numbers of first-language speakers, largest first.]
Why first language? I would have thought second language speakers are
just as important, given English now has more second language speakers
than native speakers. Also with Chinese and Arabic, as I understand
it, both are widely used as written languages by people who cannot
understand each other's spoken language. They would learn this
written language at school so it would be a second language in many
ways. Even to many native Mandarin speakers the written language is
much more different to the spoken than English. I would have thought
that literacy is a more important factor than spoken language for
internet penetration.
> Believe it or not, this topic was on The Rich List on Sunday.
>
> Mandarin is first.
Many Mandarin speakers speak Mandarin as a second language but almost
all have written Mandarin as their first written language.
> Cantonese is high.
Almost all literate Cantonese read and write in Mandarin. There is a
written form of Cantonese but it's very rare.
> English is way high as is
> Spanish. Surprisingly, Portuguese is 3rd. Hindi I think was 6th.
> Interestingly, the contestants said Indonesian and it wasn't on the
> list because the real language is Javanese.
On 2009/Dec/14, at 11:15 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> The initiative to boost use of Arabic on the Web was launched on
> Monday
> following the domain name registration, which opened the Internet to
> millions of Arabic speakers put off by a language barrier.
>
> Analysts say Arabic is just 1 per cent of Web content.
Internet world stats says it's 17%
--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294 M: +39 3494957443
mailto:kim at holburn.net aim://kimholburn
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