number of languages vs number of speakers

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leosmith
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby leosmith » Mon May 08, 2017 5:30 pm

smallwhite wrote:Should not include (100,1)?
Should use numbers and not percentages?

100% of the people speak at least 1 language, so (100,1) is a valid data point; I see no reason to exclude it.
Either numbers or percentages would work, as long as you're consistent.
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby smallwhite » Tue May 09, 2017 4:48 am

leosmith wrote:100% of the people speak at least 1 language, so (100,1) is a valid data point; I see no reason to exclude it.
Either numbers or percentages would work, as long as you're consistent.


Now I realise that both numbers and percentages would work the same way :oops:

(100,1), however - I feel that people with no L2 are often completely different people from people with, and should, therefore, not be placed on the same curve as the latter. They may be or include people who are very sick, who sleep on the streets, had no education, drug-addicts, elderly parents of new immigrants. There is practically 0 chance they would ever go learn another language. So, the same way you won't include the number of men in a graph of Number of women vs number of children, I feel that (100,1) shouldn't be included.
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby SophiaMerlin_II » Tue May 09, 2017 8:51 am

smallwhite wrote:
leosmith wrote:100% of the people speak at least 1 language, so (100,1) is a valid data point; I see no reason to exclude it.
Either numbers or percentages would work, as long as you're consistent.


Now I realise that both numbers and percentages would work the same way :oops:

(100,1), however - I feel that people with no L2 are often completely different people from people with, and should, therefore, not be placed on the same curve as the latter. They may be or include people who are very sick, who sleep on the streets, had no education, drug-addicts, elderly parents of new immigrants. There is practically 0 chance they would ever go learn another language. So, the same way you won't include the number of men in a graph of Number of women vs number of children, I feel that (100,1) shouldn't be included.


Ill, homeless, uneducated, drug-addicted, and elderly persons can certianly be multi-lingual. Ill people may have learned before they became sick. Homeless people can still read, and often spend many hours inside libraries. Illiterate people may watch TV and listen to radio, or may live in or near minority neighborhoods which speak another language. Drug-addicts may have learned a language in primary, secondary, or post-secondary school. Elderly people may have learned a language when they were younger, even if it doesn't match the language of the country they moved to.

Additionally there a glaring problem with the data set:

It only concerns speakers in Europe. If one were to include for example the US, China, and Japan, the percent of mono-linguals would significantly increase and multi-linguals would significantly decrease.
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby nooj » Thu May 11, 2017 12:21 am

Is china actually monolingual? I would wager there are proportionally more multilingual chinese citizens than americans or citizens of european nations, if you take into consideration that they may speak multiple chinese languages.
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby SophiaMerlin_II » Thu May 11, 2017 5:26 am

nooj wrote:Is china actually monolingual? I would wager there are proportionally more multilingual chinese citizens than americans or citizens of european nations, if you take into consideration that they may speak multiple chinese languages.


Ah, this might be true. :oops:
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby reineke » Thu May 11, 2017 12:03 pm

nooj wrote:Is china actually monolingual? I would wager there are proportionally more multilingual chinese citizens than americans or citizens of european nations, if you take into consideration that they may speak multiple chinese languages.


"In a situation where a Han person is present, everyone speaks Chinese (the Hans are usually monolingual)."

Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and ...
Stephen A. Wurm, ‎Peter Mühlhäusler, ‎Darrell T. Tryon - 1996 - ‎Language Arts & Disciplines


"... increased contact with Han people and/or other minorities. ... been a very rapid increase in bilingualism and shift to Chinese monolingualism, so much..."

"Now less than 7 percent of the Qiang are monolingual in Qiang."

The Vanishing Languages of the Pacific Rim
edited by Osahito Miyaoka, Osamu Sakiyama, Michael E. Krauss

An increasingly monolingual, Mandarin-dominated education system

"As a consequence of the intensive Han influx and the growing significance of Mandarin within and outside the province, in comparison to the Uighur language, Xinjiang's education system has profoundly changed."
China: Assimilating or radicalising Uighurs?
EPRS

The last of the Manchus
One hundred years on, only a few native speakers remain

"A CENTURY ago it was the “national language” of a vast empire. Today Manchu mixes with cigarette smoke blown through the wrinkled lips of 86-year-old Zhao Lanfeng in Sanjiazi, a village in China's north-east. The words she croaks in her thatch-roofed, mud-brick farmhouse are precious. Ms Zhao (pictured) calls herself one of only two fluent native speakers of Manchu left in the village, one of the last redoubts of a language that is verging on extinction."

http://www.economist.com/node/21531525
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby nooj » Thu May 11, 2017 3:14 pm

Han is an ethnic group, not a linguistic one. Therr are numerous chinese languages that the han speak and putting it all under 'chinese' obfuscates things. For example my chinese (han) friend speaks putonghua and cantonese and quite a bit of hokkien, all of which are chinese languages, as well as english. He is assuredly as multilingual as any european with three or four languages under their belt.
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby reineke » Thu May 11, 2017 4:30 pm

nooj wrote: I would wager there are proportionally more multilingual chinese citizens than americans or citizens of european nations, if you take into consideration that they may speak multiple chinese languages.


nooj wrote:Han is an ethnic group, not a linguistic one. Therr are numerous chinese languages that the han speak and putting it all under 'chinese' obfuscates things. For example my chinese (han) friend speaks putonghua and cantonese and quite a bit of hokkien, all of which are chinese languages, as well as english. He is assuredly as multilingual as any european with three or four languages under their belt.


Given the massive slaughter of languages going on in China, I don't feel like singing kumbaya to Chinese multilingualism.

Europe is far from being a continent of perfect polyglots but the EU is actively supporting language learning and multilingualism, the literacy levels are higher than in China, English language proficiency is higher, and more people are formally studying other languages. Also, as you are well aware, Spain is not all about monolingual Spanish speakers and Italy is full of "dialects" that are often classified as languages.

Here's an interesting article about the linguistic diversity in China:

On Saving China's Dying Languages
Kellen Parker, co-founder of the Phonemica project, believes preserving a language means preserving history.

"So then there's the question of "what's a language and what's a dialect?" for which there is no real answer. The Mandarin a person from Xuzhou in Jiangsu would speak at home is pretty much unintelligible to a Beijinger. They form a continuum where people at the ends can't understand each other, but from one town to the next the degree of mutual intelligibility is pretty high, from town to town, all the way to Beijing. For Phonemica, we say that Wu and Mandarin and Cantonese are all different languages of the same language family, much like Italian and Spanish and French are grouped as Romance languages in Europe. Others might say that Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects of Chinese. Neither opinion is really wrong, because the language/dialect distinction is entirely arbitrary, and some scholars may have a broader or narrower focus in making such distinctions...

How quickly are these minor languages dying?

"The answer is different in different places. If we're just looking at a language like Wu, which is spoken in and around Shanghai, we can see clear changes from one generation to the next. In many of these places, the generation after today's children won't be able to speak the local language. Every day we talk to people who lament that they can only understand but not speak the language of their parents, or if they speak it, it's only at the most basic level. These aren't small languages either; we're looking at languages that have tens of millions of speakers. There are languages that are dying out because there are only 100 speakers, all of whom in their 70's or 80's, and there are languages that are dying out with millions of speakers. The reason is fundamentally the same, though: More and more people are consciously using Mandarin at home."

https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archi ... es/276971/
Last edited by reineke on Thu May 11, 2017 5:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: number of languages vs number of speakers

Postby nooj » Thu May 11, 2017 4:56 pm

I have no idea what you're trying to say in relation to my post.
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