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Speaker counts (Re: Internationalization and the IETF)

2000-12-08 01:00:02
At 15:09 07/12/2000 -0600, Matt Crawford wrote:
>  If the world had asked you or me to design an international
> language, I think either of us would have done better.

Don't be too sure.  Even today, there are no more speakers of
Esperanto than of Mayan.

Take care.

The SIL Ethnologue claims that the Mayan language family has 68 different languages as members, with Maya (Yuteco, Peninsula Maya) spoken by 700.000 speakers in Mexico "according to a 1990 census".
http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Mexi.html#YUA

According to the Esperanto FAQ at http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-5.html, quoting the "world almanac and book of facts", the best guess for the number of Esperanto speakers in the world is approximately 2 million.

                Harald

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Harald Tveit Alvestrand, alvestrand(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: Harald(_at_)Alvestrand(_dot_)no