Adjust Belarusian-speaking population for Belarus
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Conrad Nied March 28, 2025 at 3:26 PMEdited
Re-opening this because of discussion on the PR
I know it’s disappointing but I’m not yet convinced that my methodology was in error.
It should add up to 100%: Nope, Usually there is missing data and even people that don’t speak languages. It is rare a country would add up to 100% - in fact due to bilingualism it should be more. In this case the data source I had only indicated 1 language preference per person.
Which table was used? (census link) The Github comment referred to the table on p37 about people’s native tongue, showing >50% Belarusian. I used the table on p41 reflecting the language people most commonly use at home “на котором обычно разговаривают дома”, which shows the Belarusian ethnic majority prefers to use Russian, even at home.
Native tongue or language at home? Since the goal is CLDR is to reflect Common usage (hence the C in CLDR) I choose to use the table reflecting how people use the language – regardless of which they are ancestrally tied to.
I can see a future where we list BOTH pieces of data in CLDR. I do like the idea of separating language counts by overall Common Use, Comprehension, Speech, and Writing. The database is too limited today.
Tone of Tickets: I don’t like when people demand things. However, I have experience launching products in Belarus and Belarusian adoption was indeed a fraction of Russian adoption. I checked various sources – many who strongly disagree – but I examined the data objectively and saw it was right.
Why 2025? We have a significant back-log of tickets updating population numbers. Lots of missing languages, lots of stale data. I’m working on 1) clearing the backlog and 2) designing a better way to handle the data so it can scale better and, as said, work on expanding the kinds of data we can offer.
Steven R. Loomis March 28, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Note: Ticket was reopened, there’s commentary in GitHub here
Please continue discussion here on the ticket for 48.
UnicodeBot March 10, 2025 at 4:32 PM
🛬 Merged PR
@conradarcturus merged a PR to unicode-org/cldr:main
CLDR-14479 Fix Belarus locale demographics (#4398)
Mark Davis February 26, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Adding to the Migration section of the 47 release notes.
Conrad Nied February 21, 2025 at 9:03 PM
According to the 2019 Belarusian Census
https://www.belstat.gov.by/upload/iblock/345/34515eeb3bb5f4ea5ca53b72290e9595.pdf
25.92% of Belarusians use Belarusian at home
71.24% of Belarusians use Russian at home
The rest are different languages or not available in the Census.
If you have a different source let me know, otherwise I’ll add these numbers in the coming weeks.
Hi!
I talked to the creators of Calamares on GitHub in order to understand why the main language for Belarus is Belarusian. I was given a link: https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/38.1/supplemental/territory_language_information.html
Then I was unpleasantly surprised. I do not know where you got the data from, but in the list, Russian and Belarusian need to be swapped: in Belarusian, it says good if 1 million. The vast majority of the population - 9 million-uses only Russian every day at home, at work and in other areas of life.
I understand that the Belarusian-speaking radical minority is trying to impose Belarusian on the vast majority, but this does not mean that it is the native and most familiar language for the whole country.
I do not ask, but I demand to deal with this bug and take urgent measures to correct it. And correct the data that is shown in the table at the link above - they are not just incorrect, they are ridiculous. And, of course, they do not correspond to reality.