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how many people in the world understand esperanto ?

de ravana, 9 de agosto de 2015

Aportes: 48

Idioma: English

ravana (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 14:05:29

I mean from basic level to better .

Red_Rat_Writer (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 14:47:49

No one knows exactly, but people have a lot of estimates.
Here a Vikipedio article on it: https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nombro_de_Esperanto-...

mbalicki (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 14:50:23

I don't know anything about intelligibility between esperantists and speakers of some other language (probably Romance), but the best estimation of the number of Esperanto-speakers worldwide comes from the Facebook statistics (is there any better database about people around the world?) from 2014, which gives the number of 2 million speakers (not differentiating by the level of their knowledge).

Precisely speaking, there were 350 thousand users, who have stated they speak Esperanto, and based on this and two variables (not every speaker writes about it and not every human uses Esperanto), which are pretty well estimated (based on the similar data about other languages) it gives the number of 2 million speakers.

ravana (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 14:59:28

Then my topic about reopening gxangalo is now posible with that number of speaker . Thera are even smaller languages that have good portals . Even a everage city can have it .

Red_Rat_Writer (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 15:28:26

If you want to open up Ĝangalo, then take the initiative and open it. No one wants to work for free, and you can't/shouldn't expect them to. If you're passionate about the project and want to see it realized, then the responsibility is in your hands to get it done.

erinja (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 16:04:16

I don't see the creation of such a portal at this point.

But there are certainly news sites (though the news is sometimes regional in character and may not interest you)

http://eo.mondediplo.com/
https://eo.wikinews.org/wiki/%C4%88efpa%C4%9Do
http://esperanto.cri.cn/
http://novajhoj.weebly.com/

jdawdy (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 18:17:28

My gut feeling, based on organization memberships (UEA etc), Facebook groups, Lernu posts, congress attendance, local groups, internet lists of users, Duolingo interest, number of denaskuloj, etc etc is that the breakdown might be something like this (again, this is a WILD GUESS with no statistics to back it up- just my personal feelings):

Highly Fluent speakers (i.e. at a level near that of a native speaker): ~50,000-100,000
Intermediate to Advanced (can read and write without difficulty, various degrees of spoken ability): 500,000-1 million.
Basic (at about the level of completing a lernu course or the Duolingo tree): ~1 to 2 million.

These numbers may or may not include "inactive" Esperantists- those who learned Esperanto a long time ago and have never used it- I just can't even begin to guess about that. Also, I strongly suspect that there is a large, unaccounted-for mass of Chinese and Indian Esperanto speakers, but we don't hear about them because of the lesser degree of internet penetration. That could easily add another half million to the above.

erinja (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 19:19:48

jdawdy, I think your numbers are high. I think you'd at least have to remove a zero from each category.

jdawdy (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 20:03:09

erinja,
That would mean only 5,000 to 10,000 fluent speakers, 50,000 to 100,000 intermediate speakers, and 100,000-200,000 Basic speakers. Those numbers seem exceedingly low. While I can agree that the high end of the numbers I posted may not be likely, I think the low-end numbers are at least in the ballpark: 50,000 fluent, 500,000 intermediate-advanced, and 1 million basic.

I will say that what you are suggesting may very well represent the number of active Esperantists. What I am proposing though is the number of people who have, at some point in their lives, achieved some level of ability, regardless of whether or not they are actively use it.

mbalicki (Mostrar perfil) 9 de agosto de 2015 23:25:41

Tiel aŭ alie, is there any argument against the validity of the estimate based on the Facebook statistics?

I mean, there we have an enormous and very diverse database and one easy equation with parameters estimated well, basing on other data and numbers of the users of other languages, which have multiple sources and are easy to grasp.

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