[lg policy] State literacy question

[Emily McEwan-Fujita]

Thank you very much to everyone who responded to my question about state
literacy statistics! Your responses were very helpful. I am actually using
your perspectives and sources to inform a section of a paper I am finishing
up about literacy in a minority language. The paper is titled "The Ideology
of Literate Speakerhood in Interactions between Adult Gaelic Learners and
First-Language Gaelic Speakers in Scotland", and it will be coming out in
vol. 26 of the journal Scottish Gaelic Studies this November (with a
footnote thanking everyone of course!).

I had wanted to find some statistics on adult literacy rates in English in
the UK to compare with various government-generated reports on adult
literacy in Scotland, and to use all of this and the critique of states'
ideological concerns with offical state language literacy to provide a wider
perspective for my discussion of the 2001 Scottish census statistics on
Scottish Gaelic literacy.

The very interesting thing, if one follows the trail from Wikipedia to the
UN to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, is that the UNESCO IS doesn't
actually have a literacy rate figure for the UK. The figure of 99% literacy
for the UK quoted in Wikipedia (drawn from the UN Human Development Report
2009) was a made-up figure created as a stand-in so that the UN report
authors could calculate the UK's 2007 Human Development Index score. They
did this for quite a few of the states, but there is no rationale given for
it in the footnotes of the table! More grist for the mill...

Thank you,

Emily McEwan-Fujita
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