1.3 billion of humans don’t have Wikipedia in their native language
UPDATE: If you want to contribute, see page Missing Wikipedias at Wikimedia Strategy wiki.
I am preparing document for Wikimania. Presently, I am in process of analyzing data (SIL [1], Ethnologue [2], Wikimedia projects). I am using Ethnologue data for population estimates.
Before I started this task, I thought that the situation is not so bad (or good, if it is about possibility for development). I thought that we are around the end of languages with more than 1M of speakers. However, this is far from being true.
There are no Wikipedias in ~240 languages with more than 1M of speakers. Of those, more than 20 have more than 10M of speakers.
The biggest language without any Wikimedia project is Jin Chinese, with 45 millions of speakers.
Around 1 billion of people belong to the group of big languages without Wikipedia (or any Wikimedia project) in their language. Of those, 480 millions have test projects, but 550 millions don’t have even test project; including:
- Jin Chinese, 45M, China
- Haryanvi, 38M, India, incubator
- Xiang Chinese, 36, China, incubator
- Maithili, 34M, India, incubator
- Nigerian Pidgin, 30M, Nigeria, incubator
- Filipino, 25M, Philippines, incubator
- Chhattisgarhi, 17.5M, India, incubator
- Rangpuri, 15M, Bangladesh
- Seraiki, 13.8M, Pakistan, incubator
- Madura, 13.6M, Indonesia, incubator
- Haryanvi, 13M, India
- Deccan, 12.8M, India
- Malvi, 10.4M, India
- Min Bei Chinese, 10.3M, China, incubator
- Sylheti, 10.3M, Bangladesh
Around 300 millions of people are using languages with less than 1M of speakers which don’t have Wikipedia editions.
Note that for all languages in the world Ethnologue gives the number of 6.15 billion, which is pretty accurate, counting that current estimate (according to Wikipedia [3]) is 6.92 billion and that counting speakers is very different from counting official population statistics.
Those are preliminary results. We have two chapters (and strategic focus) in countries of the list above. Inside of the longer list, which should be verified, we have more chapters. I noted that there are even two languages of Germany without Wikipedia, but with more than million of speakers: Mainfränkisch and Upper Saxon (the later one without test Wikipedia).
The list of countries with languages with more than 1M of speakers and without Wikipedia is: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, China, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, India, Indonesia (Java and Bali), Indonesia (Kalimantan), Indonesia (Nusa Tenggara), Indonesia (Sulawesi), Indonesia (Sumatra), Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia (Peninsular), Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey (Asia), Uganda, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
millosh's blog
Is “Haryanvi” supposed to be listed twice?
Good question. It seems that the correct entry is about the language with 13M of speakers. document(s) at Strategic Planning wiki would be better organized.