Forums » Smalltalk » Where in the World are YOU? (RPR PopulationCensus)

Hi there all you lovely people!

I had the realization that although RPR is US-based.... this is the freaking internet! So despite my luck of doing 90% of my RPs with Americans, I wanted to know where a lot of other people are logging in from!
Below is a link to a Google Form I created. It is anonymous and there are only four questions. It asks where you call home, your languages and your fluency level.

RPR Population Census - Not official, just for fun!

I'm not aware if Kim would have this information or has posted it before, so this is to satisfy my curiosity!

I will be sure to summarize and show you the results once a good number of people have responded!
Ideally, a good number for a sample would be at least 100. I will wait until we hit that mark before providing an update!

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Edit (May 5): Officially have 75 responses! Almost there!

Taken

I've added more work for you.

I’ve taken the form!

Only a few hours so far and already 7 replies!

I only saw six of seven continents listed and mine wasn’t there so I didn’t take it.

Which continent did I miss? I count seven.
If it's Australia, that falls under the geographic region of Oceania. I just didn't want to have the confusion of the country vs the region in the section about continents. It also allows for the generic inclusion of New Zealand and New Guinea.

LOL!
Right.
Done.

Done it for you!

Yay! We've doubled to 16 responses so far! Please forward this to your RP friends so we can get a good number of people. Ideally, 100 will be a decent sample size and I'll give a statistics update at that time!

And done. Good luck to you!

After clearing out the TROLL answers, we are at 30 responses so far!

Submitted my answers! I hope you’ll publish your findings here

We're halfway there!

And yes, I will find a way to post the results here in a coherent manner!

Posteeed mine

I can't answer, sadly, for two reasons:
- I do not have a country I can call home since I move every year (on average) around the world, and without a pattern.
- I'm native fluent in two languages thanks to my parents coming from different countries, but the survey refuses to write them down.

I would also suggest allowing people to write what languages they can speak regardless of being native, fluent or just learning.

I understand your frustration. Here are some reasons for the way the survey is set up.

With regards to "Home", I realize that it is a difficult thing to place for many people - refugees, military & diplomat families, etc. The broadest I can do is have people select continents otherwise we're dealing with the whole of Earth. What I can do is add a "Prefer not to specify" option. Based on the number of responses already, this would be a small percentage of responses, as there is also the option to skip the home questions. Any skipped responses would be automatically counted as "Prefer not to specify" anyway. The concern is that this would become a troll answer (like I have had multiple times with responses indicating Antarctica).

With regards to multiple first- / native-language households, I recognize that this is not an uncommon scenario. As such, I allowed for multiple selections of fluent (native) languages in the checkbox grid. However, it is restricted to (what the internet considers) the MOST spoken/written languages for a couple of reasons.
First I can only post this survey in the SmallTalk forum, according to the rules of the other forums. There are other forums with much larger audiences / "foot traffic" where more languages could be warranted with an addition to the checkbox list. Therefore I have to go with the probability that most of the respondents will be from certain groups where these most spoken languages are most common. So far, only a handful have indicated otherwise.
Second Google Forms is restrictive. Definitely, I would like to have a form where a language can be added to the list by respondents and would show up for future respondents to also choose, as well as a dropdown box for fluency. However, Google Forms doesn't do that. The closest it comes is what I did with the Country field box, and even that is imperfect.

Example: USA, US, United States, United States of America are all considered separate answers and don't count as one country without resubmitting the entry. The logical solution for that specific problem would be to have a drop-down menu of the world's countries. This is not an easy solution and most of those countries would likely not be submitted as answers.

Back to Languages, there is not an easy solution for this either and people would not have the freedom of choosing as many languages as apply to them or how they apply to them. It would be limited either way, but the format of the checkbox grid was the closest I could come to a compromise.
What I can do is specify in the Other Fluent (Native) Language question for respondents to indicate the language they speak most often as their response. This is not the perfect solution that anyone wants, I know.
As for why the survey only allows for a single language for that field (no spaces allowed), you can thank the trolls I mentioned before for the restriction.

And I'm also not doing a national or official survey. This is meant to be for fun and while the stats person in me wants to be as inclusive as possible, it's just not feasible or (honestly) worth the hassle of fighting with the Google Form.

Had to delete more troll answers today unfortunately, so we're going to have to wait a little while longer before there's enough for me to give you all the stats.

How do you determine a troll answer?

A troll answer is one where the country doesn’t match the continent and, generally, they mark all the languages as multiple fluencies / pig-latin as their native fluent language.