Saturday, December 20, 2003

There's a little discussion down in the Comments over the status and health of Catalan. It was a good question because the guy who asked it was clearing up a doubt he had. If you have any other questions that you're afraid might seem "too simple", go ahead and ask and we'll answer them.

Somebody who posted left this link, showing how many blogs are produced in what languages. No surprise, English is first by an enormous amount. Portuguese (I assume blogging must be very big in Brazil) is second, and Farsi is third. That means there's been a blog explosion in Iran. People are expressing themselves in public. That just encourages me to be more optimistic, and I am optimistic, about Iran's future. I would not be surprised to see more evolution toward democracy in Iran, and I just bet the change will be peaceful. Polish is fourth, meaning blogging has caught on there in a big way. This is great news, meaning that Poland is into advanced technology so that it's part of everyday life now. It's a great sign of progress. Catalan is quite high on the list, and Spanish doesn't do very well at all when you figure it has so many speakers. Then again, a lot of them are poor, but i see Brazil as much more tuned in to the Internet than the rest of Latin America.

I was most surprised at the high ranking of Icelandic. There are more than 6000 blogs in Icelandic. Iceland has 200,000 inhabitants. There are no Icelandic diasporas of refugees or immigrants, like with the iranians and the Poles. Assuming each blogger has only one blog, that means that 3% of Icelanders are bloggers. And they all know English, so they can blog bilingually if they want to reach a wider audience.

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