Here's today's update. As usual, these numbers only reflect BitcoinTalk and so should not be extrapolated to Bitcoin as a whole.
§1. Overview20 languages (including the pseudo-language Skandinavisk) were enumerated at approximately UTC 0:00 for the past 6 days. These languages seem to be the only ones featuring greater than 100 posts on BitcoinTalk. 1287 posts could not be established as being of a particular language, and so were not enumerated.
§2. Trends§3. AnalysisAs usual, languages can be split into 3 distinct categories. One category, the
high-volume languages contains English exclusively. The second, the
medium-volume languages, contains most of the languages with their own subforum. The final category, the
low-volume languages, consists of Greek, Hebrew, Korean, and the Other language threads.
High-volume languages are uneventful as usual. English, as a mature language, displays stable growth.
Medium-volume languages are most spread out of any category. The spread seems to be decreasing, however, as Dutch grows faster than Russian (in relative terms). Dutch is gaining ground on Skandinavisk, and may pass it soon. By far most eventful, however, remains the rapid growth of Chinese. Although relative growth has stalled yesterday, absolute growth remains second to only English. The Chinese subforum has grown almost 50% in the past 6 days, likely driven by news reports in the Chinese mainland. The gap between Chinese and Portuguese, although still large, is shrinking.
Low-volume languages are spread over an extremely narrow range. As usual, these languages display extremely erratic growth. Greek has recently shown rapid growth, likely accelerated yesterday by its promotion from thread to subforum. It is now comfortably ahead of a stalling Turkish thread. Greek's growth is most readily attributed to its new subforum. Also of note is Polish, a threaded language, which yesterday exceeded Korean, a language with a subforum.
§4. RemarksIt will be interesting to watch the continued growth of Chinese and Greek. In terms of activity, measured by the absolute increase in posts for the last 6 days, Chinese is now second only to English. Greek activity is also on the rise, with more posts in the last 6 days than Skandinavisk.
Some boards are stalling, likely due to low populations of speakers. Despite being 4 times larger, the Italian board has seen less activity than Romanian in the last 6 days. Similarly, Skandinavisk has been growing slower than Greek—surprising, given that it is almost 10 times as big.
§5. AppendixWith 6 days of data, it is now possible to create a pie chart on posts made in the past 6 days only. This is demonstrative of the activity levels of a board. These data are important for considering how many moderators should be assigned to a particular board.