Urdu and Azerbaijani

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Know any geeks who speak Urdu or Azerbaijani?

We are working our way down the list of languages Firefox still doesn’t support, in order of the net population of that language, as worked out by my localization stats spreadsheet. (Better data on languages spoken in particular countries always welcome.)

At the moment, it seems that FF 3.1 will give us 96.4% world coverage, up from 93.4% in FF 3.0. :-) If all goes according to plan, we will have knocked off some biggies this time round – Vietnamese, Persian and Tamil.

That being the case, the five largest remaining languages are Malay, Tagalog, Urdu, Azerbaijani and Swahili. Getting them all would take us up to 98.3%, which is more than IE 7, by my calculation – although there is some controversy over how the IE figure should be calculated, and of course they don’t simul-ship in all supported languages.

Seth tells me he’s in touch with some people interested in working on Swahili, and Gen Kanai is working on finding people for Malay and Tagalog. But we have, as yet, no leads for Urdu and Azerbaijani. So if you, or anyone you know, speaks English and one of those languages, and would like to see Firefox translated into it, ask them to get in touch :-)

21 thoughts on “Urdu and Azerbaijani”

  4. Arthur: the problem is that that list is not correlated by internet population, or by country (for which we have internet population figures). It is no help to know that there are 366,000,000 people in the world who can speak Hindi. What is more important is: how many of them are online?

  5. So to answer the first half of your question: the reason that Tatar has 0 speakers is that no-one has yet given me the % language breakdown by population of any country, a significant number of whose residents speak Tatar.

    For example, I currently have 100% of the population of Russia speaking Russian, because no-one has given me any better data. If someone were to find a good source of data for the language breakdown of Russia, it would probably include a number of Tatar speakers – and then that number would rise from 0.

    Does that make sense?

  6. So I’ve now posted an updated version of the spreadsheet which uses Wikipedia figures for language and population to calculate that 3.7% of the Russian population speaks Tatar, and 1.3% Ukranian. That means there’s a Tatar internet population of about 900,000 in Russia.

    As I said above, better data on percentages of native speakers in countries would be welcome :-)

  7. I founded an outsourced IT company in Baku, Azerbaijan, but unfortunately I don’t speak Azerbaijani. But I’ll see if there is any interest from the staff in Baku.

    What statistics do you have for Azerbaijani speakers? There is a Northern (former Soviet) and Southern (Iranian) dialect, and they use different alphabets.

    rkent

  8. I’ll be posting about the situation with Malay shortly. And then Tagalog after that as well. Would very much appreciate any thoughts or suggestions or advice.

  9. Hey!
    I am a Computer Science Graduate, a blogger and a Entrepreneur from Pakistan. I am very fluent in English and Urdu, reading and writing… and a Geek also! so why not let me help you in this project???
    Looking forward to your response! :)

  10. Hey!
    I am a Computer Science Graduate, a blogger and a Entrepreneur from Pakistan. I am very fluent in English and Urdu, reading and writing… and a Geek also! so why not let me help you in this project???
    Looking forward to your response! :)

  12. Kent James: My spreadsheet currently says that 13% of Iran, 6% of Georgia and 90% of Azerbaijan speak Azerbaijani, making a total of 3.26 million net citizens. Two dialects complicates things. Because of different net population sizes, 75% of that total is from Iran and only 25% from Azerbaijan itself. So we’d want to do the Iranian dialect first. But if the only difference is the alphabet, we can do a mechanical conversion to get the other locale.

    Awais Naseer Keyani: Brilliant! I’ll be in touch.

    Baka_toroi: the localization is done and in Bugzilla, it just needs checking into source control. Given that we’ve added another beta, I don’t think it’s too late for Firefox 3.1. But you’d need to ask Seth, Axel or Gandalf.

    Gerv

  13. I am a speaker of Tagalog (which is an older orthographic variant of Filipino, the official name in the Philippine constitution and in the education system) and also of Cebuano, which has about as many native speakers and some 10 million or more second language speakers. I am willing to help localize, how do I get started?

    Cheers,

    Fred

  15. Wim: can you explain how? It seems to give details only of endangered languages which, by definition, probably don’t have a large effect on the stats…

  16. hi there, I am from Azerbaijan ofcourse know my native language and some kind of geek) can help with anything I can.

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