Am Mittwoch, 13.10.04 um 06:14 Uhr schrieb Christian Perrier:
http://www.ethnologue.com . For English, Ethnologue gives 341 million first language speakers and 508 million second language speakers; both well short of 1 billion.
Dylan is wrong here, too. In 508 million those speaking English as their first language are included.
Another problem with counting those, speaking a language as second language: Often both of the languages, one speaks are included. That results in double counting (eg. about half of the German people have English as their second language, others russian some other languages or no second language, Swiss People also normally have first and second language out of those supported by Debian).
Would be a good Idea only counting first language. If we get half of the world population with that, it would be quite impressive. - But not all can use debian as most of them will have no access to computers.
greetings Jutta -- http://www.witch.westfalen.de http://witch.muensterland.org