I'm looking at https://languages.stg.fedoraproject.org/territories/pl/, and it says: be (0.58 %) csb official_regional (0.13 %) de official_regional (19 %) en (33 %) lt official_regional (0.021 %) pl official (96 %) ru (18 %) sli (0.031 %) szl (1.3 %) uk (0.39 %) I think it's be good to order those items by percentage, rather than alphabetically. But my question is: what are those numbers supposed to _mean_? In the particular case of 'pl', I'm pretty sure that 19% of people living within the borders of Poland do not speak German. (According to some duckduckgoing, "5% declare they speak it well", but at the same time "employers declare that people usually overstate their knowledge". Approx. 40+% of school-age children _learn_ German as a foreign language, but even if that results in some basic knowledge, that doesn't mean that those people would ever be able to use the OS translated into German. Also, even if 'pl' wasn't available, they'd go for 'en'.) I can't find data for 'ru' in Poland, and it's more complicated, because 2% are native speakers, compared to about 0.5% for 'de'. But according to Eurostat [0], 22% declare knowledge of 2+ two foreign languages overall, so 'ru' cannot be even close to 18%, considering that 'en' >> 'de' >> 'ru'. Damn, I wanted to do just a quick check, but this is an interesting subject and I got pulled in ;). Eurobarometer 2012 [1], says that "proportion able to speak at loeast one foreign language has ... decreased in Czechia (-12 points to 49%), Poland (-7 points to 50%)". Meh, considering what I know about Poland, I really really doubt this. Foreign language knowledge is not great in Poland, but a _drop_ seams very very unlikely, considering that ~all school age children learn English and most also another foreign language. Also considering the number of people temporarily migrating to UK and Germany and other places for work within the EU, and the number of people consuming English media, an actual drop would be hard to achieve. Surprisingly, the same Eurobarometer table D48T shows "Languages that you speak well enough to have a conversation" PL: English 33%, German 19%, Russian 18%, which are the same numbers as in the table at the top of this email! So is the the source of those numbers? The actual question that was asked was "And which ... language, if any, do you speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation? According to the annex [2], they did 1000 f2f interviews, leading to conf. interval ±2.5 p.p. for 20%. There's also table SD5a, which shows "which languages do you understand well enough to follow news on tv or radio", with PL: English 17%, German 6%, Russian 8%. So I think it's fair to qualify this data of "English 33%, German 19%, Russian 18%" as a case of badly designed question: "conversation" can mean asking for directions towards the city centre, or maybe discussing an arbitrary subject, too nebulous. Many people declare that they can "hold a conversation" but not "follow news", so it seems it they interpreted it as only very basic knowledge. OTOH, the surprising ratios between English/German/Russian, and the fact that those ratios are rather different in the questions suggests that they had some sample selection bias. Either way, this doesn't seem to be very useful data for Fedora. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache/44913.pdf [1] https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf [2] https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_anx_en.pdf Zbyszek _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
