Sunday, August 29, 2010

Meeting Language Needs

According to the LDS Church's statistics, ecclesiastical materials are available in 166 languages. The Book of Mormon is translated into 107 languages. Below is a list of the most widely spoken languages without translations of any LDS materials. There are 15 languages with over 15 million speakers without translations of LDS materials. Chinese languages which use Chinese characters have been omitted from this list. Data for the number of native speakers per languages comes from Ethnologue.com and information regarding languages with LDS materials can be found at here.
  1. Javanese (84.6 million) - Indonesia
  2. Gujarati (46.5 million) - India
  3. Bhojpuri (38.5 million) - India
  4. Awahdi (38.3 million) - India
  5. Maithili (34.7 million) - India
  6. Sunda (34 million) - Indonesia
  7. Oriya (31.7 million) - India
  8. Sindhi (21.4 million) - Pakistan
  9. Uzbek (20.3 million) - Uzbekistan, minority language in surrounding countries
  10. Azerbaijani [North and South] (19.1 million) - primarily Azerbaijan and Iran
  11. Chhattisgarhi (17.5 million) - India
  12. Oromo (17.3 million) - Ethiopia
  13. Assamese (16.8 million) - India
  14. Kurdish (16 million) - Turkey, Iraq, and Iran
  15. Rangpuri (15 million) - Bangladesh
These 15 languages are spoken by 6.6% of the world's population. Seven of the 15 languages are spoken in India, two are spoken in Indonesia, and two are spoken in Iran. I am not aware of any plans for prospective translations of Church materials in any of these languages. Church materials are not currently in these languages as the Church does not have a presence in most areas in which these languages are spoken. Only Javanese is spoken in an area with multiple LDS congregations whereas other languages are spoken in areas without LDS congregations.

3 comments:

  1. We definitely could get going on materials in Indian languages. The church growth in India especially warrants translated materials there.

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  2. I wish there are church materials in Esperanto, so I could share them with my friends who speak this language.

    ReplyDelete
  3. There is a LDS Esperanto group:

    http://poresperantamormonaro.weebly.com/index.html

    ReplyDelete