Andre Engels wrote: > On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Lars Aronsson<[email protected]> wrote: > >> Of these 270 languages of Wikipedia, only 41 have more than 50,000 >> articles and only 69 had more than 1 million page views in July of >> 2009. The 69th most used Wikipedia is Swahili. This East African >> language has 50 million speakers, which is huge, but less than >> 13,000 Wikipedia articles. Can poverty and illiteracy alone >> explain why the Swahili Wikipedia is so far behind? > > Poverty, or better said, lack of internet access, is probably the main > factor. Here in Europe and North America, we are used to having fast > internet from the home 24/7. In those countries it may well be (I am > not sure, never having been there) that dial-up speeds paid per minute > at some internet cafe is the norm. That would considerably lessen > people's interest in writing the material, and if it is not written, > people will not read it either. > > But another issue could be a lack of expectancy of having material in > the own language. I have heard this plays a role with the languages > from India, and it may well have the same, or even stronger so, with > the African ones: the daily language for speaking is the local > language, but when one is writing or looking for something on the > internet, one is more likely to use English (or in other parts of > Africa, French). It may well be that many Swahili speakers use English > when they are on the internet - either because that is the language > they learned reading and writing in (although people for which that is > true are probably not the generation using internet the most), or > because they found that they can get so much more information (on the > internet as a whole) in English than in Swahili, that it well > outweighs the linguistic disadvantage. They come to the English > Wikipedia, not the Swahili one, and when they find that here too there > is much more in English, that's where they stick.
This explains the situation very well. In the case of languages not using the Latin alphabet, there is one more obstacle: you need a localized computer, i.e. for reading, at least the proper fonts are needed, and for writing an adapted keyboard is also needed. For what I have seen, this is rarely the case in India. Every computer is sold with an English keyboard only, and the fonts must be installed by the user himself. > In the case of Swahili there is yet another factor, namely that > Swahili itself is rarely a mother tongue and much more often a second > language. Because of that, the relative size of the disadvantage of > using English is even smaller. Right. This is also the case for Hindi, the second or third language for more than 200 M speakers (native Assamese, Bengali, Bihari, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya or Punjabi speakers and more). Yann >> But Swahili is far from the worst. Swahili has twice as many >> speakers as the West African language Yoruba (50 vs 25 M, both are >> huge languages) and twice the number of articles (13 k vs 6.3 k), >> but the Swahili Wikipedia had 6 times as many page views (1.0 M vs >> 172 k). Somebody with knowledge of Africa should study this in >> more detail. For the speakers of these languages, in which >> proportions do they read (newspapers) or listen (to radio >> broadcasts) to get news and knowledge? Do they ever use (printed) >> encyclopedias? > > Taking a look at Wikipedia, I see > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Nigeria and > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Kenya. For Nigeria > about 32 newspapers are given - from their titles, 80% seem to be in > English. The 3 or 4 mentioned for Kenya are all in English, and > although the articles mention some of the papers have Swahili sister > publications, the English language newspapers seem to have by far the > greatest market share. This I think confirms my hypothesis above, that > another reason for African languages to do so poorly is that in the > countries and regions where they are spoken, there is a large > competition from the languages of the former colonizers - especially > in the area of written communication. -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
