[lg policy] An article from South China Morning Post

[Slavomír Čéplö]

It is quite obvious the infographic merely scraped data from Ethnologue and
such without schecking. For example, Austria is not listed among countries
speaking German which is because the Ethnologue entry for Standard German,
for some reason, only lists the Voralberg State for Austria (
http://www.ethnologue.com/language/deu). There is also the mysterious
figure of 0.7 million speakers of German in Austria. Now the only
explanation for that I have is that a) they only consider Standard German
and b) someone misunderstood the Swiss census figures: a comparable number
appears in the entry for "Languages spoken at work" which is one of the
categories that make the distinction betwen Deutsch and Schweizerdeutsch.
The total population figures don't make that distinction, so there is no
way to tell how many people in Switzerland speak Hochdeutsch and how many
speak Schwyzertüütsch. (
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/01/05/blank/key/sprachen.html
).
And then, of course, there are the usual problems of counting Hindi and
Urdu as two languages and Arabic as one with 242 million native speakers,
not to mention the ridiculousness of such an exact figure for the world's
languages.

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 4:49 PM, <info at scmp.com> wrote:

>  Message from sender:
>
>
>
> *One typo I noticed: Telugu spelled "Telegu", a common error HS*
>
> [image: South China Morning Post]
> Published on *South China Morning Post* (http://www.scmp.com)
>
> Home <http://www.scmp.com/> > INFOGRAPHIC: A world of languages - and how
> many speak them
> ------------------------------
>   INFOGRAPHIC: A world of languages - and how many speak them
> <http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages>
> [1]  Submitted by Laurence.chu on May 27th 2015, 9:05am
>
> There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today.
> Twenty-three of these languages are a mother  tongue for more than 50
> million people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion
> people.
>     ------------------------------
>  *Source URL (modified on Jun 1st 2015, 6:21pm):*
> http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages?comment-sort=recommended
>
> *Links*
> [1]
> http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages
>
>
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