What the devil is that?, you are asking.
Well it is a graphical representation of the different languages spoken by attendees to the Sydney meeting last month.
At registration, we asked all attendees to select which of six languages they spoke. It’s not going to be perfect – we didn’t capture all attendees; not all attendees responded to the question; and some probably didn’t realise what the question was asking – but it is a pretty good indication of who came to the Sydney meeting (an English speaking country but one in Asia-Pacific).
What does it show?
Well, that the majority of attendees are English speakers. We already knew that. But looking at previous stats we can tell you that there is a significant increase in the number of non-English speakers.
What it also tells us is that there are a significant number of attendees who do not claim to speak English – and that clearly will be an issue at an ICANN meeting which is almost exclusively in English (although we do try to provide interpretation in every main session).
Fortunately it would appear that only a very few Chinese speakers were not also English speakers (we were worried about that as we decided not to have Chinese interpretation despite the meeting being in Asia-Pacific, based on early registration figures).
It is also significant that the majority of Russian speakers said they did not speak English. Since we have never interpreted a meeting in Russian, we may need to look at whether the low attendance of Russian speakers is as a result of this.
Your thoughts?
That’s my quick analysis. If others have insights, please add them as a comment below. Or if you think you can do a better graphical representation than what is above, the raw data is below – feel free to email me any efforts (kieren [dot] mccarthy [at] icann.org).
| Languages | AR | EN | ES | FR | RU | ZH |
| AR |
3 | 6 | ||||
| EN | 6 | 471 | 7 | 19 | 1 | 17 |
| ES | 7 | 20 | ||||
| FR | 19 | 40 | ||||
| RU | 1 | 7 | ||||
| ZH | 17 | 4 | ||||
| Total | 9 | 521 | 27 | 59 | 8 | 21 |
| Unknown: 395 |
N.B. There are two pieces of data missing from this chart: EN+ES+FR = 3; EN+AR+FR = 2