Author’s Note: This is an on line version of a paper that Mike Bergman recently released under the auspices of BrightPlanet Corp The citation for this effort is:
M.K. Bergman, “Tutorial: Internet Languages, Character Sets and Encodings,” BrightPlanet Corporation Technical Documentation, March 2006, 13 pp.
Yoshiki Mikami, who runs the UN’s Language Observatory, has an interesting way to summarize the languages of the world. His updated figures, plus some other BrightPlanet statistics are:
. . . . . . .
Category Number Source or Notes
Active Human Languages 6,912 from www.ethnologue.com
Language Identifiers 440 based on ISO 639
Human Rights Translation 327 UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Unicode Languages 244 See text
DQM Languages 140 Estimate based on prevalence, BT input
Windows XP Languages 123 From Microsoft
Basis Tech Languages 40 Based on Basis Tech’s Rosette Language Identifier
Google Search Languages 35 From Google
