On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 14:57, emijrp <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2011/7/11 Milos Rancic <[email protected]>
>> Note that estimates from the past (and likely from the present) count
>> that no language with less than 1M of speakers would survive 2050.
>
> If Wikimedia projects and WMF leave to die 90% (or 80%, or 70%, or 60%) of
> current languages in the next 40 years (we will be alive to see it,
> probably), then both are failures.

I think (but I am not sure) that I posted this link [1] here a couple
of weeks ago.

Speaking just about languages, the situation is approximately the next:

speakers   total speakers  number of languages
100M+   2,514,548,848   9
10M-100M        2,376,900,757   78
1M-10M  950,166,458     303
100k-1M 284,119,716     900
10k-100k        61,223,297      1837
1k-10k  7,823,891       2025
100-999 460,911 1039
10-999  12,664  343
1-9     528     134
sum     6,195,257,070   6,668

So, number of languages with less than 10k is approximately 45%, but
it is around 8M of people in total or 0,0015 of world population. It
is highly likely that that number of languages won't exist in ~100
years. (Some of those below 10k will survive, but some of those above
10k won't.)

To make those languages viable enough to survive -- much more work
than just our is needed. I am sure that 10% of military budgets of the
world countries for one year would preserve all languages, but that's
the other issue. Basically, that's not our failure as Wikimedians, but
failure of our civilization.

[1] 
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=tCwO11tFPLPB-SJafDesypg&authkey=CPCE5pMB#gid=1

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