[Air-l] Minority languages online

[Cunliffe D J (Comp)]

Hi,

Pedro Oiarzabal was asking about figures for minority languages. From my own
reading of the 'literature' there is very little written about this. Some of
the figures that have been produced are based on really crass assumptions,
for instance assuming that patterns of internet access for majority language
speakers can be generalised to minority language speakers.

However, here are some of the fragments that I have managed to glean (sorry
for odd phrasing, I have cut these bits out of a book chapter):

Estimates from 2000 (Vilaweb, cited in Pastore, 2000) suggested that 0.14%
of web pages were in Catalan and 0.01% in Basque. Langer (2001) suggests
that between 1999 and 2001 the number of web pages (per speaker) in Basque
almost doubled, in Catalan more than doubled, in Galician increased by
almost four times and in Welsh by almost five times. The Global Reach (2004)
figures include an estimate of 3.4 million native Catalan speakers online.

Pastore, M. (2000) Web pages by language. Online document:
http://www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/demographics/article.php/408521

Langer, S. (2001) Natural languages and the world wide web. In Bulag. Revue
Annuelle (pp. 89-100). France: Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises.
Online document:
http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/people/langer/veroeffentlichungen/bulag.pdf

Global Reach (2004) Global internet statistics (by language). Online
document: http://global-reach.biz/globstats/

One of my Research Assistants is working on a project looking at measuring
minority language presence on the web, but also characterising that
presence. We don't just want to know how much, we want to know what sort. We
are still at an early stage with this, so unfortunately don't have any
results at this stage.

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics has a report on Language Diversity on
the Internet forthcoming
http://www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?URL_ID=5213&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201
I don't know if this is the work mentioned by Elijah Wright in an earlier
email, or whether it will include minority languages.

Be seeing you.

Daniel.

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Daniel Cunliffe
Minority Cultures & ICT Group
University of Glamorgan
Wales, UK.