Readership Data
Why Readership Data?
Readership research has been a hallmark for publishing houses to gather data on the reach of a specific media and the characteristics and distribution of their audiences.
Our mission of preserving languages brings up interesting questions about the movement of languages - both historically and in the present - whether it is through the acts of former colonial power or through mass migrations or anything in between. This map is our attempt at exploring and visualising these patterns throught analysing the download data of three of the oral stories in our collection.
Intoduction to the Data
The downoads have been analysed for three of the oral stories in our collection: Le Petit Chaperon Rouge - Little Red Riding Hood (French), La historia del toro Fernando - The Story of Ferdinand the Bull (Castilian Spanish), and Sa Aking Mga Kabata [To my Fellow Youth] (Tagalog). We corelated this data with the percentage of speakers in the country for French and Spanish and the Filipino Diaspora in the case of Tagalog to come up with explainations or questions about where we see people listening to the stories.
Analysis of Data (Possible Explainations)
French: Le Petit Chaperon Rouge - Little Red Riding Hood
The French language emerged during the era of the ancient Roman Empire. As Latin and Roman influence expanded under Roman rule, language groups merged and provided a shared foundation for trade interactions across present-day France and neighboring areas. Substantial growth in the number of French speakers occurred from the 17th century onward, as French gained prominence among the educated elite, including regions beyond Europe and Russia.
From the 16th until the late 19th century, France was a prominent colonial power. Initially, France laid claim to significant territories encompassing present-day USA, Canada, and various Caribbean nations (first colonial empire). This expansion was followed by further acquisitions in vast regions of Africa and the Pacific Ocean, islands near Madagascar, as well as parts of India, Vietnam, and Cambodia (second colonial empire) through which the French language spread globally.
Our data shows a signicant amount of downloads from Southern Australia and singular downloads in the neighbouring states of Puducherry, India (fromer French colony). We also see downloads in Quebec, Canada where French is the official language to this day and the neigbouring provinces of Ontario and British Columbia. The general trend also seems to imply more interest in the language in the eastern states of the United States which share a borded with Quebec and Ontario.
Spanish: La historia del toro Fernando - The Story of Ferdinand the Bull
Modern day Spanish can be traced back to spoken Latin brought by the Romans during their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula during 3rd century BC. Spain (a major colonial power) brought the language across the Atlantic to the Americas by Spanish explorers and Conquistadors in the 16th and 17th centuries, and it spread rapidly throughout North, Central and South America and the Caribbean. The language spead in different parts of the world around this time through conquest and writing. War, culture, territorial and literary expansion, all played a role in the rise of Spanish as a language of global importance.
We see downloads of the story spread out sporadically in the former colonies and Spain, where we see downloads from Galicia, an autonomous region in Spain culturally and lingustically different from the rest of the country. We also see downloads in capital regions of other countries - possibly due the global significance of the language.
Tagalog: Sa Aking Mga Kabata [To my Fellow Youth]
Tagalog has its origins in the Manila region located on the northern main island of Luzon and belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. After the conclusion of Spanish colonial rule in 1897, Tagalog was adopted as the national language and remained so until 1986. It serves as the foundation for the official language Filipino, also known as "Pilipino," which was introduced in 1959 and bears a close resemblance to Tagalog. While not an official language in the Philippines anymore, Tagalog is still the most widely spoken language in the country.
Tagalog is not widely spoken in other parts of the world. It’s primarily used in the Philippines and micronesia region. However, there is a considerably large number of people speaking Tagalog in North America and Western Asia but it accounts for less than 5% of the population in these countries.
The most downloads are coming from the central Philippines, the region around Manila, the capital, where Tagalog originated and is being widely used. There is also a noticeable interest in other parts of the country such as Dabaw and Cebu. In the rest of the world, downloads can be seen in Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Norway, United States and Canada among other countries where there is a significant Filipino diaspora relative to their sizes.