Number of languages.... (Re: Unilingua)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On lørdag, september 17, 2005 16:31:14 +0100 Caoimhin O Donnaile 
<caoimhin at smo.uhi.ac.uk> wrote:

> I look forward to the day - hopefully very soon, when I can use
> Google to find pages in Scottish Gaelic.  Scottish Gaelic has only
> about 50,000 speakers but it has not been denied a language code.
> There are probably thousands of languages with more speakers than
> that....

why use "probably" when there are data available....

Actually, the SIL Ethnologue says that there are 1.239 languages with more 
than 100.000 speakers, and 1779 languages with 10.000-100.000 speakers, so 
"thousands" may be right, but it's likely to be in the low thousands (one 
or two).....

<http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size>

                          Harald