India, English, and the Computer
A mere 10 percent of Indian language pages [on the Internet] use Unicode characters, and only those pages are searchable via conventional search engines such as Google. Although Enlglish is widely used in government and business, it is only understood as a second language by 5 percent of the Indian population. The Indian Constitution recognizes 22 official languages, and native speakers of these languages total more than a billion. WebKhoj [and Indian-laguage-focused search engine] will be available in at least 10 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, and Punjabi.*
Let's see, 5 percent of 1,000,000 is.... ?
Taken from the Autumn 2006 issue of The American Scholar.
posted by Clemens @ 5:04 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Only 500k? I think that is under reporting. I have Indian friends that say they use English as their lengua franca when traveling the subcontinent.
--Joey
I left out a few zeros. Mea culpa! One billion is not an easy number to get your head around. 5% or 1,000,000,000 is actually 5 million? That a lot of people, but like you I believe this is serious undercounting. I'll have to do some more research. Ask your friends what they think.
And thanks,
Tio
Mea Culpa on me doubly, I know what the population of India is and 500k is 50% not 5% of 1M. I guess I will blame it on being tired :-P
BTW, 5% of a billion is 50 million, but as my physics prof used to say, "what's an order of magnitude between friends"
And fwiw, I still believe 50 million is undercounting. Sure lots of India is backward and poor but English is stressed in school. Now the stickier part is determining what constitutes "speaking" English. In the US, since we don't stress foreign languages, knowledge of basic phrases constitutes "speaking" whereas in other countries, "I speak a little" is usually pretty proficient.
--Joey
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