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Book of Mormon in Elvish per Scripture Central<\/a><\/p>\n In terms of translating sacred scripture, we have nothing on the Protestants. One of the go-to sources for describing and cataloging languages, the publication <\/span>Ethnologue<\/span><\/i>, was originally started (and is still used, I believe) as a tool to help Evangelical Christians record which languages still needed Bible translations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A question I\u2019ve had in the back in my mind for a while is if we\u2019ll ever get to a point of saturation with scriptural translations, where we\u2019ll basically have translations for all major languages outside of some uncontacted Papua New Guinean tribe and everything becomes about maintenance. However, when you juxtapose the number of BoM translations (115, according to the latest on Wikipedia) with the thousands of thousands of languages it\u2019s clear there is a lot more work to do. <\/span><\/p>\n However, languages follow a sort of power distribution where a small number of languages are responsible for a lot of speakers, and <\/span>there is an argument made that there are significant diminishing marginal returns once you get past a certain number of languages. Furthermore, the number of languages used will decrease sharply over the next century as globalization incentivizes people to switch over to lingua francas and predominant national and international languages over their local patois. So on one hand we have a professional translation department working on very out-of-the-way languages, and on the other side of the equation we have a significant decline in said languages. I was curious about the actual numbers involved so I decided to run my own on a variety of different questions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For my source of data I\u2019m using <\/span>a fascinating Nature article<\/span><\/a> that uses variables like road density to project the future of language diversity worldwide (specifically the supplementary material). Here I\u2019m using \u201cL1\u201d speakers, or the number of mother tongue speakers. For BoM translation purposes, while a lot of people speak lingua francas and could read Church materials in the languages of the colonisers or what have you, I assume that to really get it in their own language they would need to have an L1 translation. For Book of Mormon translations <\/span>I\u2019m using the Wikipedia article on it<\/span><\/a>, which is probably a year or two out of date.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n First: What is the Distribution of L1 Languages Worldwide?<\/b><\/p>\n I calculated the quintiles for number of languages by number of speakers. As you can see, the vast majority of languages have less than 100,000 speakers (the median language has 6,000). So there is definitely a power distribution here, where a small number of languages are responsible for a large number of speakers. For translation purposes this means there is obvious low-hanging fruit, but after those are picked the effort per person starts to skyrocket.<\/p>\n 0%: 0<\/p>\n 20%: 400<\/p>\n 40%: 2840<\/p>\n 60%: 12,400<\/p>\n 80%: 76,000<\/p>\n 100%: 921,000,000<\/p>\n Second: What are the most spoken mother-tongue languages that do not have a Book of Mormon translation?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n By far the top position is Bengali with around \u00bc billion L1 speakers and no complete Book of Mormon translation. However, it is currently in the process of being translated. After Bengali it drops off significantly with #2 being Javanese at about 84 million. After Javanese the next 11 with one exception (Sundanese) are Indian languages. This kind of surprises me. I thought there\u2019d be more languages from the Muslim world in the top spots, but evidently not. There is, of course, a long history of India not being a particularly fruitful missionary field, and I wonder how much bilingualism influences the decisions about which translations would be more impactful. For example, there is a Book of Mormon translation in Catalan, the local dialect of my mission in Eastern Spain, but virtually everybody who speaks fluent Catalan speaks fluent Spanish, so while the Book of Mormon in Catalan is kind of a nice overture to Catalan nationalists, I\u2019m not sure it actually influenced comprehensibility that much.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Third: Are there any untranslated European languages with significant speakership?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Yes. Bavarian is listed as its own language in the <\/span>Nature<\/span><\/i> article, and there are no complete translations of the Book of Mormon into Bavarian (paging Jonathan Green).<\/span><\/p>\n Fourth: What % of L1 speakers are covered by current BoM translations worldwide?<\/b><\/p>\n 67%, not as much as I thought, but again these are L1 speakers, so it presumably doesn\u2019t cover, for example, a big chunk of Africa where they are fluent in one of the lingua francas (e.g. Swahili, Arabic, English, French), but their L1 mother tongue is technically their local language, so this number should <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> be interpreted as how many people can fluently read the Book of Mormon.<\/span><\/p>\n Fifth: Which Book of Mormon translation is most \u201cniche,\u201d with the fewest number of speakers?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n The Yapese language, spoken on the Pacific island of Yap, has 5,000 speakers. Matter of fact, <\/span>Yapese\u2019s Wikipedia article<\/span><\/a> has a picture of the Book of Mormon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sixth: Are there any endangered languages with Book of Mormon translations?<\/b><\/p>\n