[Air-l] internet linguistic variety citations desired

[elijah wright]

> I'm all for independent verification, especially given the difficulty of
> figuring out what exactly is getting measured here, but I don't

right, most sources of this data don't give very much detail about their
collection methods or possibly inaccurate data.  [for instance - how many
of these internet users are multilingual with english and some other
language readily accessible to them?  how many are multilingual with at
least minimal competence in four or five of the top 100 languages
spoken/written worldwide?  how are these people being counted?  these are
the fun questions...]

> follow the logic that because they want to sell more statistics, theirs
> can't be trusted. Are they more likely to sell future statistics if they
> misrepresent or make errors? Are there specific ways in which you have
> reason to believe their estimates are innaccurate?

i can understand your skepticism.  perfectly sensible.

back-story:

global reach sells a lot of things.  ;)  one of their other big markets is
translation services - they would love to help translate your corporate
site into twenty languages, if you can afford it.

in this case, i think a bit of slightly anti-corporate bias is justified.
if their statistics are biased toward a view of multilingual use on the
internet as successful [rather than a view of the computing landscape as
dominated or colonialized by English-language material], then perhaps it
helps their business case.  "perhaps" may be "significantly" if it means
the difference between (say) 35% and 60% English-language penetration
net-wide.

this is all supposition, still, but it definitely seems a good time for
CYA approaches.  and i think i'm showing my personal biases a bit too
clearly.

[Nancy, I forgot to thank you for sending the links.  *blush*]

best,

elijah