Thanks to the kind efforts of Minsu Jang the FOAF-a-Matic is now available in Korean. I’m really pleased.
With the tool now available in ten languages I thought it might be fun to estimate what the potential user base might now be.
With a bit of googling I found this localization guide. The statistics include figures for the number of people using the internet primarily in a given language. This is distinct from the number of people who actually speak the language (either as primary or secondary users), and those who are multi-lingual and may prefer to browse in another language, e.g. English.
The figures are shown in the following tables. The first sorted alpabetically, the second by population size. Each language is linked through to the entry in the globalization guide if you care to dig around some more yourself.
| Language | Millions of Users |
|---|---|
| Danish | 3.23 |
| English | 228 |
| French | 22 |
| German | 38.6 |
| Greek | 1.6 |
| Italian | 20.2 |
| Korean | 25.2 |
| Japanese | 52.1 |
| Spanish | 40.8 |
| Swedish | 6.2 |
| Total | 437.93 |
And now by online population size:
| Language | Millions of Users |
|---|---|
| English | 228 |
| Japanese | 52.1 |
| Spanish | 40.8 |
| German | 38.6 |
| Korean | 25.2 |
| French | 22 |
| Italian | 20.2 |
| Swedish | 6.2 |
| Danish | 3.23 |
| Greek | 1.6 |
| Total | 437.93 |
Do I think over 400 million people are going to sit down and create themselves a FOAF file using the tool? Of course not, but I find this interesting reading, not as a chest-puffing exercise — the translators did all the hard work, not me — but as graphic indication of how localizing an application can vastly increase it’s potential userbase.
If you want to help there are a lot more languages on the list and the instructions are straight-forward.
Lost Boy 