[Air-l] Hungarian and others

[elijah wright]

>> Some statistical work was done for UNESCO here last year that indicates 
>> that there is vastly less language diversity on the internet than is 
>> routinely claimed.
>>
>> And I'm talking about whole orders of magnitude of difference, here, 
>> not just a few percentage points.
>
> Elijah, that sounds quite interesting -- can you describe the 
> methodology?

My vague recollection is that John and I started with dumps of data from 
Global Reach - which included jupiter mediametrix, nielsen netratings, et 
cetera - and compared it to language population size data from SIL's 
Ethnologue, UNESCO's own data, and a few other things.  Including internet 
host numbers from the Netcraft people.

Population and language diversity data is a real mess - there is no single 
authoritative source for numbers.  And you have problems that crop up with 
countries like Taiwan - which clearly exists as a seperate entity than 
mainland china, but does not appear in any of the UN's data because of the 
political difficulty of giving it any kind of recognition as a seperate 
political body.

Sorry that I don't remember more - I didn't write the paper, just cleaned 
a bunch of the data.  And this has been almost 18 months ago, now.  It is 
an interesting lump of work.

elijah