Why have so many welcomes!?

If the potential visitors to this site are those people who understand English, then the table below suggests that only one quarter of those people who understand English, use it as their first language. Rather than be ignorant, I try to welcome all visitors in their first language, that is, the language they understand best and that welcomes them most effectively.

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The world's top twenty spoken languages

    Mother-tongue speakers
  • 1 Chinese (1,000 million)
  • 2 English (350 million)
  • 3 Spanish (250 million)
  • 4 Hindi (200 million)
  • 5 Arabic (150 million)
  • 6 Bengali (150 million)
  • 7 Russia (150 million)
  • 8 Portuguese (135 million)
  • 9 Japanese (120 million)
  • 10 German (100 million)
  • 11 French (70 million)
  • 12 Panjabi (70 million)
  • 13 Javanese (65 million)
  • 14 Bihari (65 million)
  • 15 Italian (60 million)
  • 16 Korean (60 million)
  • 17 Telugu (55 million)
  • 18 Tamil (55 million)
  • 19 Marathi (50 million)
  • 20 Vietnamese (50 million)
    Official-language populations
  • 1 English (1,400 million)
  • 2 Chinese (1,000 million)
  • 3 Hindi (700 million)
  • 4 Spanish (280 million)
  • 5 Russian (270 million)
  • 6 French (220 million)
  • 7 Arabic (170 million)
  • 8 Portuguese (160 million)
  • 9 Malay (160 million)
  • 10 Bengali (150 million)
  • 11 Japanese (120 million)
  • 12 German (100 million)
  • 13 Urdu (85 million)
  • 14 Italian (60 million)
  • 15 Korean (60 million)
  • 16 Vietnamese (60 million)
  • 17 Persian (55 million)
  • 18 Tagalog (50 million)
  • 19 Thai (50 million)
  • 20 Turkish (50 million)

Source: The Cambridge Factfinder, Cambridge University Press, 1993

My aim is to have welcomes in the top fifty languages, and any language with more than 3 million readers online. This will then provide a first language welcome to any of approximately 4.5 billion people who might drop by.

That most people haven't got access to the internet isn't, I think, a reason not to do this. Indeed, the ease with which I do it may, in some small way, encourage others. Of course, if any of the remaining 1.5 billion or so, bags of mostly water happen to come here, then I would hope, almost expect, that their speaking a relatively trivial language will also have them understand other, more significant, common languages that are available here.

For those interested, the table above presents speaker estimates for the world's top 20 languages. The first column lists the languages on the basis of the number of mother-tongue (first-language) speakers. The second column gives population estimates for those countries where the language has official status.

Note that the totals do not always coincide, since some major languages (such as Telugu and Javanese) are not official languages of whole countries, and some languages (such as Malay and Tagalog) are official languages of multilingual countries. The second column's figures are often overestimates, as by no means everyone in the countries where a second language is recognised (e.g. India) will be fluent in it.

In order to view the text of another language you need a font that can display that part of unicode that defines that languages characters. Unicode, is similar to ascii, in that it provides a unique reference for characters, however unicode defines characters in most every language of the world.

Find out more about the world's languages at www.ethnologue.com and www.omniglot.com. Find out more about Unicode at www.unicode.org and Alan Wood's Unicode Resources.