2021 Canadian census

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2021 Canadian census

dusseaux.antoine_289191, Mon, 2023-01-23 12:15
Regarding: 
Population
State
Closed
ISO 639-3: 
fcs

L1: 990

L2: 6,195

I think you said you'd manually enter all entries of the new Canadian census, but just in case, I am posting this contribution as I found this particular example interesting, I don't think we have the L1 and L2 figures for a lot of sign languages (usually we only have "all users" based on some assumptions of the local deaf population).

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Comments

Chuck Fennig, Mon, 2023-01-30 16:51

Dear Antoine,

I do not usually change populations for sign languages; the Sign Languages Editor, Albert Bickford, puts in 90% of the information on sign languages. I did add the 2021 census user population to the printed remarks for L1 population for Quebec Sign Language [fcs].

Best wishes,

Chuck Fennig
Managing Editor, Ethnologue.

J. Albert Bickford, Thu, 2023-02-02 13:02

Dear Antoine,

Thank you for bringing these census figures to our attention. We have updated the commentary in Ethnologue to reflect this new data. The Canadian Association of the Deaf has a much higher figure than the national statistics, which to my mind is unrealistically high if it is supposed to represent L1 users of ASL, but it is not clear whether they are also including L2 users (hearing people). That association, however, also has argued that the official government figures are unrealistically low, and they have good reasons for saying so. As a result, we're going to stay with an estimate based on 0.1% of the total population as the numeric value that we quote (which is the normal assumption used by linguists), but also cite the other estimates in textual commentary.

--Albert

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