Quiz

#48 -- They would only have to be literate enough to recognize "kreyòl ayisyen" on the poster. The information is for a telephone service.

#49 -- Interesting.
I looked it up for Amsterdam. The main website is only available in Dutch, and in part in English, but some of the brochures etc. are available in Dutch, English, Turkish, and Moroccan Arabic. A few things are available in Dutch, English, French, Turkish, Moroccan Arabic, Berber, Somali, Farsi, Papiamento, and Servo-Croatian. I'm surprised to see Farsi in that list.

Have done the same for London to discover that it has about 250 different languages and that the eighth most commonly spoken is 'English-based Creoles', with 10700 speakers.

Farsi comes in at eighteenth with 3300 speakers

Esperanto?

Have done the same for London to discover that it has about 250 different languages and that the eighth most commonly spoken is 'English-based Creoles', with 10700 speakers.

I've seen a number of references (none to hand, of course) that London primary school kids speak 300-350 different languages between them.

#50 --

After a little thought, I realized that although almost all literate Haitians would probably be able to make out a poster in French, there are many who would be reluctant to call for help of any kind if they knew they would have to speak in French and would be addressed in French. So it makes sense to have the sign in Creole.

I wonder what the Amsterdam authorities mean by written Moroccan Arabic.

#54 -- You're right. Maybe the Moroccan Arabic service also applied to a phone service. (There was no good overview of services, so I hopped around a bit through the site, when writing #50.)

I poked around the website of the City of Miami. Much of the written information is available in English, Spanish and Kreyol, which suggests that there are a good number of Haitians who prefer written Kreyol to French.

Interesting, I never realised that there was much demand for Haitian Creole in New York. Nor that it had a (standard) written form.

I just had a look at my town's website (in the UK) and some written information is available in Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, French, Spanish, German, Korean, Polish and Portuguese. I'm surprised they specified Cantonese, as I always believed the written form to be identical to Mandarin.

My local city council has translators available for speakers of Maori, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and Samoan. I know there are brochures and forms in more languages though.

However, the other local council (I live right on the border so have a lot to do with the 'other' one) oddly provides very little information about translation or other language services. It is odd because while that city is quite small (only 50,000 people) it has a very large number of immigrants & refugees. It is particularly involved with various refugee resettlement programmes and prides itself on it. I wonder if perhaps they get around providing its inhabitants with a lot of information by simply providing them with a general toll free number to go through. The council is particularly involved with the New Zealand Settlement Society so perhaps they direct their new residents there first.

Speaking of Creole ! There are different creoles, like where i am we speak creole but 210 kilometres away its another creole and 2 hours flight away is a third type of creole. They do not completely differ but if speaking quickly it might take a while before understanding all the 3 styles. Haitian creole is also completely different to the three Mascarenes creoles !

LR