research monkey
Jan. 15th, 2009 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksWas recently hired by a friend to provide a research bit for a book she is writing.
Three library systems, Lexis Nexis, the beneficence of a different friend, and the Atlas of the World's Languages shiiiny why does it have to be $750 on Amazon later, I believe I have determined that (as of Dec. 2008) there are on the order of half a billion people in the world who currently use the Arabic alphabet (or versions of it with only small variations) to read and write. This involves eighteen different languages in addition to Arabic and its forty-odd dialects, and does not count languages which use Arabic script modified more than slightly (there are about ten of those) and languages which used to use Arabic script and have stopped more or less recently (such as Uyghur or northern Azerbaijani).
Also please note I said 'on the order of', not 'on the close order of', as some of the literacy data is simply nonexistent and I have had to generalize literacy rates from entire countries to subpopulations within the countries, which I know is bad statistics but is almost certainly closer than guessing.
Still, assuming the data I was working with was correct, I would not be surprised if I were off by five million but would be if I were off by fifty. (I did round up to half a billion, but actually only by a few hundred thousand.)
So I thought people might find that interesting.
Also, dear CIA, why no literacy data for Western Sahara?
Three library systems, Lexis Nexis, the beneficence of a different friend, and the Atlas of the World's Languages shiiiny why does it have to be $750 on Amazon later, I believe I have determined that (as of Dec. 2008) there are on the order of half a billion people in the world who currently use the Arabic alphabet (or versions of it with only small variations) to read and write. This involves eighteen different languages in addition to Arabic and its forty-odd dialects, and does not count languages which use Arabic script modified more than slightly (there are about ten of those) and languages which used to use Arabic script and have stopped more or less recently (such as Uyghur or northern Azerbaijani).
Also please note I said 'on the order of', not 'on the close order of', as some of the literacy data is simply nonexistent and I have had to generalize literacy rates from entire countries to subpopulations within the countries, which I know is bad statistics but is almost certainly closer than guessing.
Still, assuming the data I was working with was correct, I would not be surprised if I were off by five million but would be if I were off by fifty. (I did round up to half a billion, but actually only by a few hundred thousand.)
So I thought people might find that interesting.
Also, dear CIA, why no literacy data for Western Sahara?
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Date: 2009-01-15 07:22 am (UTC)Nine
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Date: 2009-01-15 08:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-15 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-15 05:08 pm (UTC)Some of the languages are very small, such as Arwi, which is Arabic-Tamil and hence found mostly in Sri Lanka (but not very much there). Some of them are pretty fair-sized, such as Kashmiri or Pashto. There's also a thing where there are a couple of languages that are written in Arabic as an ideological point in primarily Islamic countries-- pretty much every language in Pakistan is written in Arabic script, even when the same ones are written in Devanagari just across the border. So even some Slavonic dialects use Arabic script in the Caucasus.
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Date: 2009-01-15 12:50 pm (UTC)