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<DIV>Dear Frans,</DIV>
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<DIV>Your questions are important. Let me add another point which has to be considered: Deaf and severely hard of hearing people are still excluded from acquiring literacy in many countries because sign languages or other methods of visual communication are not applied sufficiently. If you take a percentage of 0,1/0,2 % (for developed countries) up to 0,5 or 1% (for less developed countries) of the respective populations, there is also a lot of communicative/language-discriminated people in the quoted number.</DIV>
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<DIV>Best Regards</DIV>
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<DIV>Franz<BR><BR>>>> Frans Plank <frans.plank@UNI-KONSTANZ.DE> 9/8/2011 8:02 >>><BR>Dear literate lingtypists,<BR><BR>were you aware that today is UNESCO's International Literacy Day? (http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/education-building-blocks/literacy/advocacy/international-literacy-day/ <BR>)<BR><BR>They complain that 793 million adults worldwide lack minimum literacy <BR>skills: one in 6 adults is still not literate.<BR><BR>Does anybody know how they count the speakers of non-written <BR>languages? Does 'illiterate' in UNESCO speak also include these?<BR><BR>Are there reliable figures of the numbers of non-written languages and <BR>their speakers? I'm asking because I tend to mention this sort of <BR>thing in teaching. Perhaps typologists should be aware of this, too.<BR><BR>yours<BR>Frans<BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>