> D-I officially supports 41 languages including English. Some have asked me about calculations similar to what I mentioned at Debconf : what is the percentage of the world population which can at least understand one of the supported languages?
I have used data from http://www.photius.com/rankings/languages2.html as well as population data for a few countries (for languages with a low number of people speaking them...mostly languages of one country, when they were not mentioned in this source). The result is 68%, that is 4379M people over 6400M. As this results of rough approximations, I think we can mention that Debian Installer is usable by 2/3 of the world population. As an example, the number for French in the above source is 125M. As one may see, this number is lower than the addition of populations for countries which have French as an official language (this includes many African countries where only a small fraction of the population really speaks French) but higher than just adding fr_FR+fr_BE+fr_CA+fr_CH). There is some bias in the values, of course : for instance, one may guess that all people listed for ca (Catalan) are also listed for either Spanish or French. Apart from very few exceptions, I think that all Catalans speak and read one of both. So, we should only use this for what it is : a rough estimate....and then work on getting more native languages supported. The used values are the following ar 250 bg 10 bs 19 ca 11 cs 16 cy 0,5 da 5 de 125 el 12 en 1000 es 450 eu 1 fa 40 fi 6 fr 125 gl 12 he 5 hr 3 hu 14,5 id 160 it 70 ja 130 ko 75 lt 5 lv 3 nb 5 nl 30 nn 1 pl 47 pt 200 pt_BR 0 (included in pt) ro 27 ru 320 sk 4 sl 3 sq 4 sv 10 tr 70 uk 60 zh_CN 1000 zh_TW 50 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
