Supported fraction of world population (was: Final status of Debian Installer string freeze)
> D-I officially supports 41 languages including English.
Some have asked me about calculations similar to what I mentioned at
Debconf : what is the percentage of the world population which can at
least understand one of the supported languages?
I have used data from http://www.photius.com/rankings/languages2.html
as well as population data for a few countries (for languages with a
low number of people speaking them...mostly languages of one country,
when they were not mentioned in this source).
The result is 68%, that is 4379M people over 6400M.
As this results of rough approximations, I think we can mention that
Debian Installer is usable by 2/3 of the world population.
As an example, the number for French in the above source is 125M. As
one may see, this number is lower than the addition of populations for
countries which have French as an official language (this includes
many African countries where only a small fraction of the population
really speaks French) but higher than just adding
fr_FR+fr_BE+fr_CA+fr_CH).
There is some bias in the values, of course : for instance, one may
guess that all people listed for ca (Catalan) are also listed for
either Spanish or French. Apart from very few exceptions, I think
that all Catalans speak and read one of both.
So, we should only use this for what it is : a rough estimate....and
then work on getting more native languages supported.
The used values are the following
ar 250
bg 10
bs 19
ca 11
cs 16
cy 0,5
da 5
de 125
el 12
en 1000
es 450
eu 1
fa 40
fi 6
fr 125
gl 12
he 5
hr 3
hu 14,5
id 160
it 70
ja 130
ko 75
lt 5
lv 3
nb 5
nl 30
nn 1
pl 47
pt 200
pt_BR 0 (included in pt)
ro 27
ru 320
sk 4
sl 3
sq 4
sv 10
tr 70
uk 60
zh_CN 1000
zh_TW 50
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