Re: another language reconstruction question

Florian Rivoal wrote:

> Now adays, the world's population is around 6 bilions,
> with more or less (i believe) 3000 languages. that is an
> average 2 milion speakers per language. and if you
> consider only the "major" languages that are likely to
> survive in the future, the you get an much higher average
> number of speakers.
I'd like to add that 60% of the languages have less than
10,000 speakers. 85% have less than 100,000 speakers. Only
5% are have more than 1 million speakers.

Half of all the languages of the world have no more than
10 million speaker altogether. But the eleven languages with
the most speakers are actually spoken by half of the world's
population.

So calculating averages like you do doesn't really give
results that are useful.

||| daniel

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