On 20 May 2009, at 06:44, David Huynh wrote:
And look what happened to Esperanto... After one century, 2 million speakers, or 0.025% of the world population.
Given that most human languages don't have a definitive "start date", it is difficult to directly compare this with languages like French or Spanish. At the time French "started", it already had millions of speakers because French was defined by whatever the people of France were speaking.
That said, 2 million is fairly impressive. It beats Basque, Welsh and Irish Gaelic - the last of these is an official language of the EU!
-- Toby A Inkster <mailto:[email protected]> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
