and god forbid they're collecting human subjects data and discussing it with you. no, wai-

Here are the 11 workshops: www.bantugent.ugent.be/bantu11/#anc... #Bantu11

the essential problem is that, as bad as Ethnologue's figures are, Glottolog does not even try to provide similar figures (population, development level, etc). so they continue to occupy their niche. I'm not sure it's sustainable as the figures get more and more out of date.

I could also go on about the overly rosy assessment of "development" (if SIL made an orthography it's automatically "developed" or "developing", regardless of uptake) but that's another thread and this is too many replies already 😓

Kejom (Babanki) is my case in point. Ethnologue IIRC gives a figure that is probably 3x the number of daily, fluent users of the language, which affects ability to get endangered-language funding to work on it. similar issues all over the place.

figures for most languages of the Cameroon Grassfields seem to have been derived by asking the traditional ruler associated with each language "how many people do you rule over" - leads to vastly inflated speaker counts in cases where children aren't actually acquiring the language

this pretty much happens anywhere that you can check with local people for updated figures - the figures were very often off in the first place and haven't been changed for 30+ years. it's clearly not a priority to revise the figures for accuracy (and so then what is Ethnologue for?)

Regretfully I must report that because of the meter, I heard this to the tune of "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer"

scicos: "Yes... ha ha ha... YES!"

I see no need to apologize, no problem!

Trump has said that 600,000 Chinese students will visit America in coming years, and his party is trying to punish any academic who advises them.

as a side note @maartenkossmann.bsky.social you might be interested to know that in the Middle Belt of Nigeria lots of students actually take Hausa as a school language course after they get to a certain level with English. I was totally unaware of this before visiting Abuja, at least.

if you are expected to speak English to even do primary school, parents may use more English with their children *before* they go to primary school, which could be really damaging

but as for the Nigeria decision I can see it cementing in a lot of minds the paramount status of Speaking Good English, and this having a big effect on children's language diet in home settings.

in Cameroon you hear a lot more "mother tongue" out and about in public by comparison, and the vehicular language is very often Pidgin (except for die-hard Francophones), and rarely English.