"::::::::::Oh I do enjoy insulting people whose behaviour makes them fully deserving of insults. It was you that made the issue of Ethnologue being a RS a big affair (as scripta manent - even in WP - all a reader has is to go up a few comments and see arrogant statements such as ""Until you can produce a reliable linguistic source that has conducted more recent linguistic surveys in northern Greece, then Ethnologue is the most recent, most reliable source."" when there was no census in 1986 to begin with! The gall of some people is astounding: they've all become ""specialists"" when they can hardly follow the Greek literature - because if they did you would be (a) dismissing Ethnologue's 1986 crap outright and (b) quoting the V-PRC survey which is recent and despite an obvious flaw of assuming no pluri-lingual descent/ability is the most recent and extensive statistical country-wide survey of use/understanding of non-Greek languages and significant Greek dialects in Greece to-date. If you were a specialist you would know that the US SD's ""estimate"" is not the result of a survey (do you seriously believe that any type of similar survey by a foreign power into such a matter would have gone unnoticed and not being reported in the Greek media causing a diplomatic episode?) but the estimate based on visits to some parts of Macedonia (in Greece) of a certain diplomat (later to become infamous through a very public resignation) called Brady Keisling that single-handedly raised the profile of the issue in the SD's HR reports. If you were a specialist - instead of trying to guess numbers you would be giving the number of villages in which the language was spoken by at least some inhabitants according to the 1996 Euromosaic study (which your pal FPS has apparently read - but still has been unable to digest enough to add Arvanites in Thrace in his ""map""). Then again you could do worse - your other pal Jim62sch seriously believes that you could have a non-government sponsored census (mind you not survey) in Greece (actually I wonder in how many developed countries can anyone other than the government ""convince"" people to stay home and open their doors for census takers to visit). Or that the results of such a private 1986 census would not become public until 2005! Maybe the evil Greek nationalists had a hand in that as well. God spare us from the all-powerful WP ""specialists"".   
"