Re: Ethnologue.

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000 21:18:07 -0700, J Matthew Pearson
<pearson@...> wrote:

>Glancing over all these ethnologue entries, I notice that most people's
>languages have over 100,000 speakers.  Some have millions of speakers.  I
>know that Tokana and Tepa have (or had) fewer than 30,000 speakers apiece
>(in the case of Tepa probably far fewer).  Are there any other conlangs on
>the list with very small (fictional) speaker bases?
I haven't put much thought into population statistics. I'd guess there is a
very large population of Mizarian Mice, but what percentage of the
population speaks Jirit is unknown. Still, there are two languages I've
talked about that I'm sure have rather small populations. Zharranh
(http://www.io.com/~hmiller/Zharranh.html) is the language of the extremely
rare Kireethin people (a recent hybrid of Zireen and Sangari). I doubt
there are more than a few thousand Kireethin in the entire Kolagian sector.
Kirezagi (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/kirezagi.html) is another language
with relatively few speakers, although the numbers of the secretive
silk-fairies are probably greater than humans suspect.

Thrinn languages in general tend to have small populations, as it's common
for each extended family group to have a distinct language. But the Thrinn
languages that I've actually worked out in some detail are the ones with
large populations.

And I have an old, very brief sketch of a language with a single
(fictional) speaker: Rillintel, created by space explorer Edhlyt Narlend.

--
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