Re: Suggestion

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 23:32:32 +0800, Abel Cheung wrote:
> On 2003-09-05(Fri) 11:23:16 -0400, Noah Levitt wrote:
> > > It's be nice if someone could separate numbers for Portuguese and  
> > > Brazilian Portuguese, as well as for Chinese Traditional and Chinese  
> > > Simplified.
> > 
> > According to http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=POR,
> > there are 158 million Portuguese speakers in Brazil, and 10
> > million in Portugal, plus a few more elsewhere.
> > 
> > The thing about Chinese is that many different languages are
> > written more or less exactly the same way (Mandarin and
> > Cantonese for example), so you have to add up the native
> > speakers of all those languages. My guess is that the
> > population of China, rounded down to the nearest hundred
> > million ;-), is a good enough estimate for Simplified, and
> > the population of Taiwan is good enough for Traditional,
> > respectively 1.2 billion and 22.6 million.
> 
> For traditional Chinese, there are about 7 million Hong Kong people too,
> so that sums up to almost 30 million. But this distinction only applies
> to written language. For langugage SPEAKERS things would be entirely
> different, as both mainland Chinese and Taiwanese speak Mandarin.

Good point. There are also native speakers of Chinese
dialects in several other countries, like Singapore,
Vietnam, etc. IIRC, most native speakers from outside the
People's Republic use Traditional writing . Maybe we should
round up to 40 million. So I propose:

  zh_CN: 1.2 billion
  zh_TW: 40 million

Funda, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ch.html
says

  Population: 1,286,975,468 (July 2003 est.)

And not all of these are native speakers of languages that
are written in Simplified Chinese (Tibetans, Inner
Mongolians, etc), which is why I suggest rounding down to
1.2 billion.

Noah