Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese
| Message 1 of 1 23 April 2011 at 11:53am | IP Logged |
So the question came up how many Esperanto speakers are polyglots, or how many of them
speak decent English. There are no official statistics that I'm aware of, just as there
are no reliable statistics of how many Esperanto speakers there are worldwide - too
hard to count on a global scale, especially taking into account that Esperanto was at a
time promoted to factory workers in rural Central Asia, that it is very popular in
Brazil, China, Iran, Western Africa and so on.
However, as the co-founder of the Esperanto social network Amikumu, I realized that I
DO have access to statistics about a survey-sized group of Esperanto speakers, who
filled in their profiles at our website. Our data is obviously skewed in favour of
young internet addicts, which implies a certain level of affluence in some regions, and
the site mostly attracted users from Western Europe and South America, but at least
it's some data.
1882 users indicated their spoken languages, including 19 native Esperanto speakers
-> 253 native English speakers, 841 non-natives
-> 119 native French speakers, 367 non-natives
-> 141 native Spanish speakers, 309 non-natives
-> 92 native German speakers, 304 non-natives
-> 30 native Italian speakers, 141 non-natives
-> 116 native Russian speakers, 116 non-natives
-> 203 native Portuguese speakers, 87 non-natives
-> 7 native Japanese speakers, 68 non-natives
-> 24 native Chinese speakers, 49 non-natives
-> 44 native Dutch speakers, 35 non-natives
-> 45 native Polish speakers, 34 non-natives
-> 30 native Catalan speakers, 33 non-natives
795 speak 2 languages (some only listed one, but I'm ruling out the possibility of
monolingual Esperanto speakers on our site and you can't sign up without knowing
Esperanto)
365 speak 3 languages
295 speak 4
186 speak 5
119 speak 6
106 speak 7-10 languages
16 speak more than 10 languages
So while there are a lot more polyglots than in an average society, there are also many
people who haven't managed to learn any language besides their native language and
Esperanto. Specifically, you can only reach about half of all Esperanto speakers
through English, and only 595 of our users actually claim to speak English at a high
level (that includes 253 native English speakers).
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