Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers/Archive 1

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French too high

Isn't the number of french as a first language too high? French is native to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada (all other coutries where it is native, like Louisiana, have very few speakers of French), where the highest estimation of number of speakers are 65, 2, 2 and 10 respectively. So the highest count give a number of 79 million and not 109 million! I honestly don't believe that there is a French diaspora of 30 million! These numbers must be changed.

English not official in so many countries!

It's listed that English is official in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Bangladesh??? This is not true at all. Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia have never been occupied by the british and have no reason to have that as an official language and unsurprisingly when I check those countries in Wikipedia it doesn't say that English is an official language. Bangladesh on the other hand may have English as an official language but the Wikipedia article "Bangladesh" does not say that English is the official language there but only bengali. I'm removing those countries right away!!!

Note: There is no reliable source for the numbers of speakers of the world's languages. The information in this article comes primarily from Ethnologue, 15th edition, which is of uneven quality. If you have access to more reliable data on a language, please reference it or duplicate it here so that it may be verified. Newspaper and magazine articles are generally not acceptable as evidence.

What do all these sources mean?

It's good that all the information is cited, but what does it mean? What do the initials WA and WCD mean? It would be good if someone could clarify that. And while we're at it someone also needs to update all the information instead of leaving it at an unreliable date like 1984. Mike 15:17, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Clean-Up then Revert. Why?

I started to clean up the wording in the Chinese section (and it took me forever to do). I didn't change any information I just moved stuff around so that people can actually understand the information a little bit more, and then Kwamikagami just reverted everything I had worked on. I don't know what the reason for the revert was, can somebody tell me?

Answered on my talk page. kwami 01:41, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Number of french speakers

Where's the consistency here? The article on French language lists the number of native speakers to be 87 million and the total to be 190 million, which is significantly higher than what's listed in this article. Checking the french language version, it had a figure of 125 million native speakers and 165 secondary speakers, for a total of 290 million. Judging by the presence of French worldwide, the number of overall French speakers must easily be between 250 and 300 million, but it's difficult to decide exactly how many would be considered "native speakers" as there are also local dialects in many of the African countries where French is the administrative and official language. There's great deal of subjectivity in the term "native speakers" as it could exclude, for example someone in Alsace who speaks Alsatian with their family and friends, while speaking the French language naturally outside of that circle. This kind of person has in effect more than one "native language." Regardless, the numbers listed here are ridiuclously below what the actual figures must be, probably below half in the number of secondary speakers, and if anyone could find a decent up-to-date source, it should be changed.

Hello, Are you sure there are only 67 000 000 of french speakers in the world when you have, for instance, 63 ooo ooo of inhabitants in France, 4 000 000 of french speakers in Belgium, 7 000 000 in Canada, 3 000 000 in Switzerland only to speak about this country and of native speakers and you can easily add 100 000 000 in Africa (included 35 000 000 in North Africa)!

This website shows a total of 3x0 000 000 of people able to speak french and the french part of Wikipedia speak about 285 000 000 of "francophones" (native + good level of french). Phil of Bristol

No, I'm not sure; I can only rely on my sources, and Ethnologue may be either inaccurate or out of date. However, we're not concerned with a "good level" of French here, which is difficult to estimate when we're speaking of millions of people; "second language speakers" here means people who use the language on a daily basis. I used to be fluent in French, and in fact was a second language speaker a few years ago, but wouldn't call myself that now.

The article tells there's 130 millions of french speakers, but I really think this is largely below the reality. Particularly, it seems there's a problem in reckoning the french speakers in Africa, because if you suppose there's approximately 80 millions of french speakers throughout the world, Africa excluded, then there would be only 50 millions of Africans speaking french. Considering that there is something like 700 millions of people living on this continent, that half of the african countries have french in the list of their national languages and that the french language is currently used by the population in these countries, I think you can consider there's, at the very least, 100 or 150 millions of french speakers in Africa ...

You're operating on a different definition of 'speaker'. Sure, there may be that many Africans who are fluent in French, but French is not their native language, and is the daily language for relatively few. Those are the things we're basing our figures on. Otherwise all we could say is that "lots" of people speak French. kwami 21:38, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

As for native speakers, the Wikipedia article has 77M, substantially less than what this article was changed to. Metropolitan France has a population of 60.5M, of whom 86% are recorded as speaking French natively. That's 52.0M. As for North Africa, Algeria has only 110k native speakers, Morocco 80k, and Tunisia 11k, or only 0.2M total - completely insignificant compared to the degree of uncertanty even within France. Canada is currently listed as having 7.7M speakers in Wikipedia, attempting to compensate for the incompleteness of the 6.7M census figure, but this is uncertain. 1.3M speakers in Switzerland in 1990, and Switzerland doesn't have a very high growth rate, so this is likely to still be accurate. Perhaps another 4M in Belgium (including Walloon), based on the ethnic percentages in 1960; it's probably a lower percentage now, due to immigration; perhaps 3.8M? In non-Metropolitan France, there are 26k in French Polynesia, 53k in New Caledonia, 7k in Guadeloupe, 9k in Martinique, 2k Reunion, for 0.1M, plus an unknown number in French Guiana which can't be more than 100k (and is likely less). Then 14k in the UK, ~100k in Italy, 1.1M in USA, plus ~1M Cajun, less than 1k in Haiti. That's ~67.3M, using the possibly inflated figures for Belgium and Canada (~66.3 using the Canadian census data). Anyway, Ethnologue's 67M figure seems reasonable. kwami 20:02, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

--Digitalmoron 14:11, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

We should not forget the large numbers of people in South Asia who are fluent French speakers - Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia all list French as a spoken language, and there is a population of French speakers in Pondicherry (South India)

I'm not aware of any significant number of native speakers in any of those states. Maybe a few old expats in Poudichery, but not in Vietnam or Cambodia. Correct me if I'm wrong about Poudichery. kwami 20:47, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

French Wikipedia doesn't even list French as an official language of Poudicher (or maybe I should start spelling it Puduchery?), so I wonder if this is an error in English Wikipedia. It does, however, say that

Il existe encore aujourd'hui une importante communauté francophone : il existe un Lycée Français et un Institut Français qui font de cette langue la troisième plus parlée sur le territoire de Pondichéry, après le tamoul et l'anglais.

I have no idea how many we're speaking of here. But since 80% of the population are recent immigrants, the max would be 200k - and that's assuming that 100% of the previous population were native French speakers, which is almost certainly not the case. So SE Asia and India make no significant difference to our figure. kwami 21:10, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

OK, following your answers and the document I read in the websites quoted below, I understand that there are AT LEAST 82 000 000 native french speakers and 138 000 000 persons who use the french often to speak it as good as native speakers.

Thank you for the informations, I needed it, I will update the website in return!

Phil of Bristol

And I will revert it in return. You have given no source for this new figure. (Nor the 220M that you changed it to anonymously.) kwami 19:18, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Here's a source posted on the French language talk page: University of Laval.

They get 75 million in the core countries (France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland), and 109 million total, but don't say were the total figures come from. Actually, the 75 million figure doesn't add up either: Combining 2005 population figures with their percentages gives 64.8 million:

• 82% of France (I assume this includes all French possessions, because the census figure is 86% for metropolitan France),
• 23.2% of Canada,
• 41% of Belgium (this figure is from 1960, and might now be less due to immigration),
• 18.4% of Switzerland,

= 64.8 million native French speakers.

They also have a figure of 1.7 million in the USA, for 66.5 million. Add in the figures above of 0.2 million for North Africa and 0.1 million for Italy, and we're still under 67 million. I'm not aware of any other country that has a significant native speaking population, if you don't count Haitian creole. kwami 05:54, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

You forget Africa.

Hello Kwami,

I am not sure you need to be aggesive for this job! As I told you, one of the source I used is YOU:"The article tells there's 130 millions of french speakers" ... who gave me the willing to know more about it.

You were OK to say that "there's a problem in reckoning the french speakers in Africa", if we know that the education is in French in the french speaking suh-saharian africa at 7 years old and older and that, in North Africa, every teenangers, going to school we have to admit that, in 20 countries in Africa 50 % of the population speak french like the french (even if, in North Africa the writing is not as good).

Anyway here are my source: http://www.quid.fr/2005/40_03.htm you have to buy the access and the 220 000 000 are from one of your source: http://www.cftech.com/BrainBank/COMMUNICATIONS/TopLanguages.html

So the situation of the french speakers in Africa is something that we can't connect to any language and need to be specified. the OFFICIAL number to write has to be 220 000 000 with a precision if you want unless you think that the african continent has to be forgotten. In this case, can you tell us why?

That's a misreading of the source. It says there are 70M native speakers, which has been rounded off to the nearest 5M. Their 220M figure is the total population of all countries where French is an official language. That includes, for example, the entire population of Canada, most of whom are anglophone. If Romania, which is part of la francophonie, made French one of its official languages, then the entire population of Romania would be added to that figure too.

7-year-olds in Africa often are often schooled in their native language, or at least a local language, though that varies from country to country. And yes, many Africans speak excellent French, good enough that I've heard French people say that you should go to Africa to learn French; you'll learn better quality French there than you would in France! That's what I did, actually, and I always enjoyed people's confusion at my Beninese accent. But these are second language speakers, and that's how they're counted in the article. kwami 19:16, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

While I understand that numbering French speakers is a difficult task, I find the estimation in this article grossly under the reality. The Wikipedia article offers as a note that nearly 90% of the people in France speak French as their primary language, including those who were raised in a different language but have basically stopped speaking it. So let's say 60 million in France. To that we can add roughly 4 million in Belgium, 1,5 million in Switzerland, thus bringing the number of native speakers in Europe to about 65 million. To that we can add 7 million in Canada, bringing the figure up to 72 million, some people say about 75 million. This is frankly a low estimate, as throughout Western and Northern Africa, a great number of educated people speak French to a level that is considered native. But even ignoring these, i can't understand how we end up with 65 million! More comprehensive estimates including the communities in the West Indies (Haiti), Northern Africa, Western Africa and Polynesia give an estimate of about 140 million speakers. It is difficult to draw the line in this case between native speaker and second-language, as some governments tend to lower the numbers of native French speakers (Algeria). Some people place the figure as high as 200 million speakers. But 65 million! That's really far from reality!

We could also double the population of English if we exagerated like this, and especially if we counted people who speak well as native speakers. And how is 90% of 60 million equal to 60 million? The figures are all listed above. If you have other data that contradicts this, please share it with us. kwami 00:10, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

You know I understand that the problem with English is similar, to separate "native speakers" from "speaking well". But there are two things I'd like to point out: first the last census estimation by the Insee is roughly 63 million inhabitants from France. Secondly, have you ever been to Morocco, Algeria or Senegal ? Strange how all the people there seem to speak French far better than many in France do. Putting the figure at 65 million is grossly ignoring the huge number of people who speak French as if it were their native language, even though they might have been raised in another one, or both. I happen to have been raised in French because my parents are French, but I have lived in the United States since I was 2. Is my English therefore not native ? We are talking about estimations, and languages require us to be somewhat flexible. And what about Haiti ? What about Luxembourg, if you want to count precisely ? I am not exaggerating, I am pointing out a problem. This estimation does absolutely not represent the totality of the native speakers of French.

Hello,

Is there a difference between "ethnologue" and the Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999) http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm ? This site gave more than 79 500 000 of native french speakers since 1999 and when wikipedia quote Ethnologue, it gives a number of 72 000 000 of native french speakers. The number of 67 ooo ooo doesn't seem to be reported anywhere now as some people mentionned in this page! Phil of Bristol 11:20, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

The 79.5M number includes Haitian. There is a difference: you can't get a job as a Haitian interpreter just because you speak French, for example. kwami 18:11, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

OK then I would be glad to understand why Ethnologue which is generally the source you use list them together as one language! Surely there are less diefference between Haithian creole French and french than between est Mandarin and west Mandarin!

Anyway there are 7 000 000 of Haithian creole French according to Wikipedia. If you take 80 000 000 of french speaker minus 7000 000, it must give 73 000 000 unless I am not very good in Math! The numbers date from 1999 so it must be around 75 ooo ooo speakers now so once again we have difficulties to understand where this 67 000 000 french speakers come from!

[User:Phil of Bristol|Phil of Bristol]] 12:36, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Haitian and French are considered different languages, as are Malaysian & Indonesian, Danish & Norwegian, Hindi & Urdu. Chinese is considered one language. How close they are is irrelevant.

As for the numbers, try reading the beginning of this thread. It explains the numbers clearly. kwami 23:25, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Dear Kwami,

You gave a very good advise on this page: mentionning the source!

It is a shame you fail to do the same! You told me "try reading the beginning of this thread. It explains the numbers clearly" clearly yes, but without any source! According to you, Ethnologue gave a figure of 67 M of french speakers. Whell, Try and give us a link if possible! You gave us a lot of numbers, perfect! Where do they come from? Who knows! It seem that this is not the case anymore!

Here are some numbers given by different source: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_lenguas_por_n%C3%BAmero_de_hablantes

For some reason they forgot to mention you! They are all between 72 and 129 millions of speakers. Wikipedia generally give 87 000 000 speakers! You seem to be the only one giving 67 000 000

As I said earlier, SIL give now a figure of 79, 576, 000 of french speakers. There should be a reason a bit more serious than "they had the haitian french which is not seen the same language"

Where do you see that they add the haitian? Is that too much to ask for these informations?

This is not very relevant to write few rows of numbers because mention only few countries and you say yourself that you don't have proper source: (I.e. "perhaps 3.8M?" "number from 1960" "the max WOULD be 200k"...). According to you the population in France is around 60 M when in fact it is 63 Millions now as ailready mention. See article here: http://www.lexpansion.com/art/15.0.139132.0.html

Phil of Bristol 14:53, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

82% of native French speakers in France ? Lol ! What a crap is that figure ! I really wonder who would be the 18% of French citizens who wouldn't have French as their native language. The figure of 67 million native French speakers given in that list is just the sum of the 63 million French speakers in France and the 4 million in Belgium. It simply erases from the datas Switzerland, the Americas (Quebec), and Africa (Maghreeb, Western Africa, Equatorial Africa). Metropolitan 12:58 Tuesday 18th April 2006 (UTC)

English vs. Spanish ranking debate

Finalize new status of English, Spanish

Al==right fine- lets just keep the page as is- everyone is happy. I am you are. And why would the WA revert back to figures that are 7 years old. I don't think so. How about we both look for more sources and then finally make a decision. But for now just leave the article as it is.

Presumably because they decided their 2004 figures were inaccurate. Which of course means we should not rely on their 2004 figures either, and should rank English vs. Spanish based on the 1999/2005 figures. It doesn't matter if you "don't think so"; call up your libary and check, or visit a book store. And no, I'm not happy with the way it is, I'm just leaving it to avoid further argument. Someone else will come along and rank Spanish at #3 according to its population, and then you can fight with them. kwami 20:20, 2005 August 21 (UTC)

Lets finally reach an agreement on what to do with the English-Spanish ranking. I have changed the format of the article section to put english with 340 million native speakers, using the 2004 WA source. I have also put spanish at 322-358 million native speakers, listed below English. The reason for this action is because English is more widley distributed and spoken and we are sure it has 340 million speakers, where in the means of Spanish it, based on our souce's numbers of 322-358 million native speakers, the World Almanac 2004 edition, could (and probably does) have less than 340 native million speakers. But since we are sure of English's status, and since it is more widley spoken and more important in a worldwide and business sense, English should be listed above Spanish in ranking. This is my final proposal, and if any one wishes to disagree with this please state it soon, or no one should change it unless new sources and information is presented. I hope everyone can agree with this compromise.

Also: I am eliminating the 1999 WA information since we now have a 2004 source that is more up to date. It has been finalized that the 2004 World Almanac ranks english as having 340 million native speakers and Spanish with 322-358 million speakers. I am also eliminating the Indiania University source since that is of 2003. The WA is a very reliable resource, probably more reliable than the Indiania University source- plus the fact that it is 2 years old and the WA one is only 1 year old. So I am leaving only the WA 2004 figures there. If anyone disagrees please state why FIRST so we can discuss i and then change the article instead of starting edit wars- right now we have reliable resources and there is no need to change them unless more recent information is presented.

This is a new definition of "compromise": We do what you want. Also, I'm not the only one you have to convince.

In 1998, Spanish stood at 322M and English at 309M. Spanish was ahead (+13M). In 2003, these figures were revised upwards to 258M and 241M. Spanish was even further ahead (+17M). This makes sense, because the population growth rate of native Spanish-speaking countries is on average higher than that of native English-speaking countries. For some reason, WA listed the new English figure, but hyphenated the new Spanish figure with the old. Perhaps they had their doubts as to its reliability. Evidently they later had doubts about both, because in 2005 they reverted to their 1998 figures. (You said the library must be wrong, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the librarian could read. I requested the 2005 WA, and verified twice that it was the 2005 edition he was reading from, because I was surprised at the return of the old figures.)

"We" are not convinced of English's status. You have made that decision for all of us, and I object. I will return the UI data. Better more data than less. And no, WA is not a particularly good reference. Have you ever browsed through it? Last time I did, I lost track of the errors. We don't have any good refs. I wish we did. kwami 06:11, 2005 August 21 (UTC)

New Compromise

Ok- first off, English has over 340 native speakers, that is what the WA says in 2004, which I am looking at right now. Spanish is ranked at 322-358 speakers, all other sources show English with around 340 native speakers. I think is what we should do is just the language list as is right now- with Hindi 2nd, and English and spanish tied, with English ranked above spanish since we are sure it has about 340 million speakers and since it is a more widley spoken language. If you decide to rank hindi with 180 million speaker's that sounds fine as long as English and spanish are indicated as tied. I am sure english has over 309 speakers, that figure was of 1998, so it is impossible for it to remain the same. Those figures listed below also are incorrect, as the 2004 WA shows english with 340 milion. English should either be second or third, then Spanish either tied or with less speakers. I think it is safe to leave it as is, with Chineese, Hindi, English, then Spanish with the indication it could have 322-358 million speakers. If you wish to do something on the contrary, please discuss it- otherwise I think its fine to leave as is.

With your approval, I think we should just have spanish as third with the indication of 322-358 million speakers, until we find further information- or just leave it at that. That libarary you called is incorrect because English couldn't have the same amount of speakers as it did in 1998, and the 2004 one says it has 340 million. So I think it is good to finalize the following:

1. Chineese

2. Hindi

3. English (With the 340 million rating)

4. Spanish (With the 322-358 rating- since spanish is more likley to have around 330 people speaking the language- Spanish is not as important or widespread as english, therefore, since we are unsure which one should be where, since English is more important and widely spoken, plus it has more total speakers, it should be third since the status of Spanish is disputed or unknown)

Compromise

Ok Kwamai- I have a compromise. We will put English at number 3, with 340 million speakers, which is an exact (or estimated by the WA) number. The WA has english at number 3- as I am looking at the 2004 WA book right now. Underneath English it has Spanish with the number of speakers being 322-358 Million. So we will rank spanish at number four, because 1) It is more likley that it has less than 340 million and 2) English is more widley spoken and has more speakers in total than spanish- so we will put English at number 3, and Spanish at number 4 with the indication that Spanish could have more native speakers than English, as the World Almanac does.

Well, the WA apparently changed their mind: I just called the library, and the 2005 WA has the following ranking:

• Mandarin 873
• Spanish 322
• English 309
• Hindi 180
• Bengali 171
• Russian 145
• Portuguese 137
• Japanese 122

[...]

• Arabic (Egyptian) 46

Hindi is not defined the same way we have it defined, so that's not a problem. Otherwise, they've reverted to their 1999 figures. If I might hazard a guess as to why, I expect they extrapolated growth based on the populations of the countries these languages were spoken in, used those figures for 2004; then realized that this was inaccurate, and reverted to the 1999 figures as the most recent reliable estimate.

So we have:

• 2004: Spanish and English tied per WA (cannot determine which is greater), but Spanish ahead per UI.
• 2005: Spanish ahead per WA as well.

Therefore I think it is reasonable to leave Spanish in 3rd place until we have reliable data to the contrary. kwami 22:13, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

• LOL. That data has Portuguese with 137 M in 2005. lolol. That data is completly unreliable. Unless they are predicting that half of Brazil will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb in 2005 with half of the population dying. So addind that half with the population in other countries we have the 137 M number! --Pedro 11:05, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Spanish

OMG! FOR THE LAST TIME! SPANISH HAS LESS SPEAKERS THAN ENGLISH! YOU PROVE WHERE YOU FOUND THAT INFORMATION OUT OR IM REVERTING SPANISH BACK TO IT'S FORMER RANKING! ENGLISH HAS MORE NATIVE SPEAKERS THAN SPANISH AND THAT IS A KNOWN FACT! GOD! You must be some anti-english person or something because you continue to revert false and outdated data! The source I gave you showed English as number 3 with 340 and spanish as number 4 with 322-358. You prove where you see it having 350. I just looked in the World Almanac (book) and it shows english at number 3, and spanish at number four with the EXACT PHRASE: 322-358 Speakers, and it's ranked at number 4. I am changing Spanish to that exact phrase and re-ranking it.

Since the WA figure did not have sufficient precision to indicate whether Spanish was #3 or #4 (322-358M overlaps the English figure of 341M), I used the only other source you provided that seemed reasonalby reliable, that of Indiana University. How they decided that 350M was the correct figure I don't know, but you're the one who provided the data, Enorton!

As for "facts", what gives you the idea that any of these are facts? They are estimates only. All the data we have is inaccurate; that's just the nature of the beast. kwami 20:17, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

Change English!!!

For the last time Kwamikagami! I have given you a 2004 WA source from numerous websites. You have information from WA 1998 it is OUTDATED by 7 years and needs to be changed. I am changing the English rating to be tied with Hindi for the time being. Until you update the rest of the langauges, it should remain either tied, second, or third behind Hindi. SPANISH HAS LESS SPEAKERS THAN ENGLISH! I am changing it and it would be stupid to re-rank Englihs back to an outdated source. Next time you do, I am reporting you because you are putting in old information when I have proven to you from the 2004 world almanac, that English has 340 million speakers from numerous web sites which site the WA as their source. You must accept the fact and move on- I have proven it to you and you are using an outdated source that has now been updated. So I will change the ranking of English.

First of all, stop giving ultimatums. You tantrums are not appreciated.

Secondly, you are the one who provided the sources showing that English is #4: Chinese, >1000M. Hindi, ~370M. Spanish, ~350M. English, ~340M. If you can't be bothered to read the information that you provide to us, why should we take you seriously?

Thirdly, I accepted and used the sources you provided. How can you complain about that?

kwami 20:17, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

Sources for English Re-Ranking

Alright, since you Kwamikagami, don't believe the fact's about english's ranking, I will give you many numerous sources. If you have any opposing ones, then state them- or we will keep the new reranking. Here is a list of many trustable, reliable sources. Because of all of these numerous sources, I am going to re-rank english. If you wish to dispute this, then you must present YOUR facts since I have given mine. Each source shows english as a number 2 or 3 language in native speakers with about 340-400 million speakers total.

Here are my sources:

-http://www.oclc.org/languagesets/educational/languages/languageranking.htm, ranks English as number 3 behind Hindi. This source is from the World Almanac 2004.

Good. If the WA is indeed the source for this, then this is of course a better source than what we have, since Ethnologue just used WA 1999. The figure is 341M, no estimate of 2nd language users. Of course, if we're going to use WA, we should be consistant and do the same for all languages.

(Actually, WA is a pretty pathetic resource itself, we just don't have anything better right now.)

-http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/l/li/list_of_languages_by_total_speakers.htm, ranks Enligsh as number 2 behind Chineese, with a total of 402 native speakers.

Nix this. This is a very unreliable reference; many of the articles are simply copies of Wikipedia. It also claims to be based on Ethnologue from 1999, and so is more dated than we are, not less!

-http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_1.htm, ranks English as number 3 behind Hindi.

This also uses the WA 341M figure.

-http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/Appendices/languages.html, puts English at number 2; this web site shows English having 340, million native speakers, and gives descriptions of each major language stating that Spanish and Hinid are not close behind.

Wrong. It puts English at number 4, behind Hindi and Spanish - just as we had it, before you changed the rankings! 340 and 510 total; similar numbers to WA. Probably taken from WA, or from the same sources that WA used, but useful as secondary support.

-[http://www2.uol.com.br/speakup/stories_b/193_language.shtml; this brittish news paper article shows English as having 1.9 billion speakers total and over 350 million speakers native.

Wrong. This appears to be based on your final source, which does not say there are 1.9G speakers, but that 1.9G live in countries where English is an official language. This includes India: only a minority there are second language speakers! Therefore this figure is useless. Newspapers are even worse sources of information than almanacs or the CIA.

-http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/toptens/languages/languages3.html, also ranks English as number 2 with 508 million speakers.

Nix. A cheesy commercial site. Does not indicate where the numbers come from, whether they're native or second language speakers. Useless.

-And as my final source, http://www.cftech.com/BrainBank/COMMUNICATIONS/TopLanguages.html, ranks english as number 2 with 350 million speakers.

The more populous languages appear to be rounded to the nearest 50M. Thus this is consistant with the 341M in WA.

-If you don't believe online sources, then check the World Almanac. Otherwise English is the #2 langauge in the world- accept it and move on. Plus, the source you listed is of 1999, that's six years ago. An OUTDATED source. So if you have any recent source that gives English as another ranking, then please discuss them here- otherwise you must accept the new ranking. However, I will include a footnote in the new ranking that says that Hindi is very close behind, tied or possibly ahead of english. However, most sources say that it is number 3 and English is number 2. Spanish, however, I think we can agree is at a safe number 4 and is not ahead of English or Hinid. If you decide to change this without stating your sources, I will report you to someone else of higher authority because I have given more than enough evidence and sources to support the re-ranking and is all you have is some outdated source from 1999.

Alright, you've provided us with one reasonably reliable source: 340M (maybe 510M total?), from WA 2004. Most of your other sources simply copy this figure, and therefore are not independent sources at all. Of course, we should likewise update all languages that don't have more reliable sources; I'll take a look at WA 2005 when I get a chance.

As for your warning, it isn't really necessary. We could put the same warning on all language entries. This should be in the intro. Right now it just says that not all data is up to date; a stronger warning is probably warranted. kwami 19:34, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

English has 400-480 million native speakers

According to many various sources, English is 1) The most widely spoken language in the world and has between 400-485 million native speakers worldwide. 300's million is totally wrong it needs to be changed.

(This anonymous posting & edit is by Enorton08.)

Give your sources, or your edits will be reverted (as it says in the text of the article). We've had this argument before, but no one has ever produced a reliable source showing English with 400M native speakers or more. kwami 03:10, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

Again, no unsubstantiated re-rankings--especially when you leave in the old reference, giving the impression that your changes are supported by that source. We've put a lot of time into trying to give this article some consistancy. English at #2 is fine: if you back up your claim. You are the one proposing the change, therefore the burden is on you to provide a reliable source for you figures. Otherwise people start edit wars over the position of their favorite language (as you are doing). Show us the beef, and no one will have any problem with your edits.

By the way, 'second language speaker' doesn't mean someone who's studied a language in high school. It means someone who uses the language on a regular basis. That's how it's figured for the other languages. French, for example, would have a much larger total if everyone who's studied it were included. kwami 06:58, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

• kwami is wright. In the article there is Spanish with 350 and English with 340. English is placed above Spanish??? If you dont want to change the ranking at least put Spanish as having 340, tied with English. This is what I've done with Portuguese and Arabic. But, I don't know if you know, but Spanish is a growing native language and English is not. And the countries were English is spoken is supported by a few developed countries, and the big number of supposed nations are tiny islands (many are dependencies). Thus it is a stable language. Therefore, I'm not surprised if Spanish is or will be in the near future more spoken than English. --Pedro 10:56, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Just my two cents' worth: our own Wikipedia lists 17 countries/nations where English is the official language (including the US, which has officially no official language...!), against 20 countries where Spanish is the only official language. Also, if you look down each respective list, you tend to have to go down much further on the Spanish list to find countries with less-than-significant demographic weight. This, to me would suggest that, counting strictly first-language speakers (native language speakers), Spanish is slightly ahead of English. But I believe it is overwhemingly evident that English wins if we include by mistake only a part of the people for whom English is a second language. I daresay this very situation possibly is at the heart of this debate. --Ramdrake 17:10, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Second language speakers

Does Spanish really have 70 million second language speakers? Where is this from because I don’t think ethnologue lists that statistic?

Should be from WA 2004. Ethn. has 60M from WA 1999. kwami 18:39, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

More Urdu speakers than Punjabi speakers?

Urdu is spoken mainly in Pakistan and some parts of India. In Pakistan, it is spoken only by 10% of people as mother tongue. Even the most conservative estimates put the Punjabi population in Pakistan at about 50% of population. The population of Pakistan is about 160 million. This means that there are about 80 million Punjabi speakers in Pakistan alone. This does not include about 25 million Punjabi speakers in India. There are also Punjabi speakers in other countries. The total Punjabi speaking population should be around 110 million, not the 57 million. The Urdu population should be around 25 million, not the 60 million.

Filipino diaspora

There are sizeable communities of Filipinos in Canada, Japan, Spain, Italy, Hong Kong, etc. Please research this well. This is well known among Filipinos. If sources are demanded, I will supply, but these facts are well known. I myself, live in Japan and there is a large community of filipinos here. --Jondel 05:35, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

(I'm just joining this discussion, not sure how it started) You're right that there are sizeable Filipino communities in those five countries, plus maybe 100 more, but none are noteworthy. "Gusto ko mag-abroad" Filipinos travel to wherever they can. My suggestion would be a note saying "Filipino communities can be found in most countries of Asia, North America, South America, and Europe" There should also be a link to an article about Filipino emigrant communities. That is what is particularly noteworth about Filipino foreign presence, and would be a very interesting article, IMO. Gronky 17:14, 2005 Jun 8 (UTC)

Not sure what qualifies as "noteworthy" but according to the last census (2001), Canada has 174,060 for whom Tagalog is the first language. Even the estimates for the percentage of English as a first language in Canada are optimistic. See http://www.answers.com/topic/language-in-canada for the full breakdown of languages in Canada. 70.71.9.244 04:42, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)Josh Oakes

341,000,000 total English speakers?!

According to these statistics, the United States - with nearly 296 million people - must contain 87% of the world's English speakers!

US Population: 295,734,134

+ United Kingdom: 60,441,457

+ Canada: 32,805,041

+ Australia: 20,090,437

= 409,071,069 people.

I'm sure that not all of those 409 people speak English as their first language, but the vast majority do - and there are people in other countries that speak English as their first language. How do you get 341 million English speakers? Rmisiak 05:56, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• the case of Portuguese is even worse. Number of speakers worldwide (article): 176,000,000 Real number of speakers in Brazil (alone): 184,000,000 so dont complain. The number of native speakers of Portuguese is 208 million. with Bilinguals: 218 million. BTW dont count the all population of a country as native speakers... just an advice. -Pedro 06:22, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As a data point, the U. S. Census Bureau reports (in 2000) that of 262,375,000 residents of the United States aged 5 and above, 215,424,000 speak only English at home, 28,101,000 (10.7%) speak Spanish at home, and 18,851,000 (7.2%) use some other language. This being so, I don't think the Summer Institute of Linguistics' estimate of 341 million first-language speakers of English, world-wide, is very far off. (The statistics on their website look awfully well-thought-out and well-researched.) Using the population figures given above, 82.1% of the United States + 80% of Canada (a guess) + 95% of Britain and Australia (more guessing) gives a total for the four countries of 345 million, very close to the 341 million in the SLI table. If 8% of the population is under age 5, and maybe shouldn't be counted, that more than offsets the native English speakers in Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. No, I think the number (for English) looks pretty accurate. Frjwoolley 16:38, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Delete Page

Hi,

I'm wondering whether it's worth keeping these sorts of pages in regards to language ranking? Statistics vary wildly depending on source and nothing seems reliable. Is it really worth keeping with so many different figures for each language?

Sukh 10:32, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• I dont think so. Ok the former page was so stupid with that summary. This new one, it is very useful, especially with the country with more speakers. This one: List_of_languages_by_total_native_speakers should be deleted and made as a redirect to this, and this one: List of the most spoken native languages merged with this (at least the nations). -Pedro 13:12, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

About the Portuguese language, don't forget also to mention that there is an enormous population of lusophones (Portuguese, Brazilian, Cabeverdian, Angolan emigrants) throughout the world. Only Portuguese emigrants are numbered around 5 million luso-descendants from the first and the second generation in countries like France, Luxembourg, Andorra, Venezuela, South-Africa, Australia, The U.S., Canada, Hawaii, Belgium, The Netherlands, The U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Argentina, Dubai, etc). They are well organised together to keep their heritage. So I think that the list is correct concerning the Portuguese speakers around the world as first and second language. Filipe

I find it very useful to have a single centralized summary of available language data, despite possible inaccuracies. Please keep this page. Thank you. -Duke student

Suggestion

That the countries listed under each language be marked in bold where the majority of the population speak that language. It looks rather silly having both e.g. the United States, and Germany, listed with equal emphasis as places where English is spoken - MPF 23:20, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• that's a good idea... what about bilinguals? for that bold listing what should we count? there aree countries where a languagee is spoken but mostly by bilinguals (i'm not talking about learning languages).-Pedro 18:43, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Locked table

Please do not modify the table contents, as they come directly from an specific source. If you have information from another source, please discuss it here first. Thanks. —Cantus…☎ 02:11, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)

What source would that be, if we may humbly ask? Argyrios 05:44, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I didnt alter any table (except adding countries and a more realistical number!), but you constantly revert my edits. Mr. Cantus if you say wikipedia is unreliable, it really is with that kind of incorrect data from your sacred source. So we are trying to correct it! -Pedro 19:05, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Marked with mild warning

I think that it is obvious that the information in the table is highly inaccurate and that there are no objective criteria for listing a country as a significant habitat for first language speakers. Christ, the CIA world factbook specifically lists English as a common "SECOND LANGUAGE" in Denmark, yet Cantus keeps reinserting it and other equally absurd countries. Whatever your source is, Cantus, cough it up -- it's not accurate. As others have noted. Argyrios 05:59, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Read the article. The source is there, as it has always been. —Cantus…☎ 02:21, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

This is deeply silly, I agree. We should distinguish countries where a language is predominant from ones where it is a historical minority from ones where there is a recent diaspora from ones where a lot of people speak it as a second language (the last, I think, should not be listed at all). How on earth is it useful to say that Portuguese is spoken in Luxembourg? john k 06:38, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Since it is the language of 1/7 of the population and it is gaining some status, just like Spanish is gaining in the US. And even Russian is gaining in Portugal (honestly I see Russian as more important in Portugal than Mirandese (an Historical and local language with some official status) - no company would ever use Mirandese, but some use Russian in ads, there Russian newspapers, etc. In the diaspora, the Portuguese have a tendency to become assimilated in a country's culture, and the language is seen as very important - so everyone is capable in speaking the official language and they propably speak it also between them in public places. I think we should mark bold where it is official (there's the problem of Africa, where the official languages French, English and Portuguese are still not widely spoken), italicize where it is spoken in the diaspora recently by more than 1 % of the population or by more than 100,000 people (or 1,000,000). the rest (historical unofficial languages) should be listed normally.-Pedro 11:50, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Right now, I think that most of the people who have commented here agree that the current table is problematic. The warning is very mild and simply says basically not to trust the info on the table (which directly contradicts MANY other articles here at Wikipedia including English Language and Arabic, for example. Please do not remove the warning unless your vote creates a majority in favor of removing the warning, and do not revert a deletion of the warning unless there is a majority in favor of having it.

Wikipedia is democratic.

For the sake of fairness, I will not re-add the warning until a few more people vote.

For reference, the warning looks like this:

{{Refimprove}

Votes in Favor of Keeping the Warning (3)

1. Argyrios 08:57, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)~
2. john k 13:47, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• just in case the last isnt accepted. -Pedro 11:50, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Votes in Favor of Not Having the Warning (0)

1. we dont need the disputecheck after the changes that were made. -Pedro 11:53, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree that it is much, MUCH better now, but I am not quite willing to change my vote yet until someone explains to me why English is 4th, when all the resources I check list it as 2nd or 3rd. Can someone provide a source for fourth? Argyrios 01:33, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• The same occurs with Portuguese that is always placed 6th and German where it is often the 9th. That is due to Arabic... it has a problem not only if it is a unified language but also native language of whom in those countries (I've no opinion in this, Arabic for me is the real Greek, I dont understand a single word, nor It is a subject of my interrest. I dont know why some say it is a single language or various, dont forget that the writing system counts in the definition of a language. The "spoken Arabic" thing that I find in wikipedia doesnt sound very good to me or even neutral, BUT I REALLY DONT KNOW! Sorry, sorry to the experts. IMO, it seems something to devide Arabic, although often the result is exactly the reverse. The problem of chinese is more simple to be solved and splited. English maybe really behind Chinese and Hindi, because these people (sorry, no offense to Indians and Chinese, ppl that I fully respect) reproduce like rabbits (maybe worse than rabbits - countries with more than a 1000000000 people O_O that should be the population of the all world!), and that doesnt give any value to these languages. Just the savage economies of today give value to these rabbit societies, one of the errors and problems of our world today. Maybe Hindi became more spoken that English the other day, because of reproduction. But many solve the problem of the world language due to rabbit societies, using "the most spoken western languages". Again, Arabic: I would like to see a real debate between neutral native speakers of different countries and respective native experts about their language. these Ppl shouldnt be fanatic and ppl that are not pro-western world. Maybe some dialects are languages, and in some places Arabic is a second language. A native would help! -Pedro 02:44, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Votes for adding footnotes with numbers corrected(1) -this wont change the original table.

1. Pedro 11:50, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

   What's the point of this? If the list is wrong, we should scrap it and make another one. The list at List of the most spoken native languages looks marginally better to me. john k 13:47, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The list is definitely wrong on a number of issues. I'm Danish and it is completely unsubstantiated to include English as an important language in Denmark (no matter what SIL says.) English is merely taught in Danish schools as a secondary language, but not used in everyday interaction. I don't find the inclusion of Japan, Italy, Germany, Honduras or Venezuela under "English" very convincing either. On a more problematic note, the list is not cross-checked with the articles about the individual languages. E.g. Armenian is listed as 6 mill. speakers but the article on the Armenian language says 9 mill. (is one of them counting a diaspora?) Xhosa is listed as 6.9 mill. while the article about Xhosa says 7.9 mill., Farsi is listed as 31 mill. while the article says 62-110 mill. It seems like we have to get a better list (and cross-check it). --Valentinian 07:25, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• • They have included France as the third most important country for Portuguese and that is not true, that place is for Angola (that in the near future will be the second place with most native speakers). Mozambique also has more 1st language speakers than France (where some are returning to Portugal). It should be listed as fourth. Besides how can France be more important than São Tomé and Príncipe and other places that use Portuguese? I think the percentage is a more reliable way to order countries. Besides there are other forgotten countries that I've included and Mr. Cantus removed it. Mbundu is really named Mbundu in English??? I really thought that the interaction was made throw Portuguese were the term Quimbundo - or Kimbundu in English/common Portuguese) - the mbundu language is preferable for several tempting reasons. But we should use what is really used in English. I really think that list was made with rush. ABout the problem of English I never went to Denmark although I plan to. But I also think much of the data for English (the language of the people who made the list, incredible!!!) is unreliable. BTW isnt English really used in Sweden or Finland? -Pedro 10:07, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

By the way the reasons for using Kimbundu instead of Mbundu are:

• Mbundu are a group of related languages
• Mbundu is similar to bunda (ass)
• Mbundu is an ethnicity
• Kimbundu means the Mbundu language and it the term that it is often used in Angola.

The article for the language doesnt even exist. o_O The portuguese article (a stub for Kimbundu) developed by a Brazilian women and I. [1]-Pedro 01:05, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Okay. Completely disregarding the African language discussion, I would like to discuss the matter of the Arabic "languages" with you. As far as the standard core of the language is concerned, they're practically all the same. Even though most North Africans are ethnic Berbers, whether they are aware of their heritage or not, the vast majority speak Arabic as a first language. I think the 250 million speakers figure for Arabic is quite accurate. It may even exceed that amount. The various spoken varieties of Arabic as listed by ethnologue -- they're nothing more than dialects. In written form, anyone can understand another. It's just like the relation between West Flemish and standard Dutch. I don't trust the number of second language speakers though; It is absurd. The SIL Ethnologue has a tendency to publish false and unreliable information. They classify the Chakma language as Bengali-Assamese in the Ethnologue, when it is clearly Tibeto-Burman. If anything, it is a language which was heavily influenced by Bengali due to close proximity of the speakers of the two distinct languages. Eric July 1, 2005 10:56 (UTC)

That's what I'm afraid. People think it is the same language, they have the same writing system, and some people think these are different languages... I would prefer the official and people's notion of language than of some groundbreaking specialists. But the cases of Chinese and Arabic seems complicated. People have a tendency to compare to the fate of the Romance languages, but that's fate, and a unique case, and it can not be compared to anything. -Pedro 5 July 2005 22:09 (UTC)

What does "they're nothing more than dialects" mean, Eric? Are you using the term in the POV sense to mean a socially dispreferred form? In linguistics, when two versions of a language are called dialects, it means that there are noticeable differences, but that their speakers can functionally communicate with each other. That is, the Queen's English is "nothing more than a dialect". What "functionally" means is of course a matter of some opinion, but by comparision with existing standards, it would mean better than Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian can communicate (unless we want to lump those together!). In a linguistic sense, Arabic is not a single language. As for having the same writing system, that's assuming a lot. Many people cannot write well enough to communicate effectively, and many more cannot write at all. For them, Arabic is not a 'language' in any practical sense of the word. Also, Japanese visiting China can communicate in writing, but that doesn't mean we should classify their languages as related. In special cases like Arabic, we might want to list pan-Arabic, as we have it, for the social sense of the word, plus the various Arabic languages separated for the linguistic sense. Or, we could have an entry for Standard Arabic, which is a unified language. This is what you're talking about with being able to understand each other in writing. However, the number of speakers is substantially less (by a good 100 million) that the total for all Arabic. (Again, what good does it do to speak 'Arabic', if you can't understand someone else who also speaks 'Arabic'?)

(As for Chakma, yes, Ethnologue makes lots of mistakes like that. But I wonder if what they call the Chak language of Bangladesh might be your language?) kwami 2005 July 5 23:04 (UTC)

Where spoken - needs much quality review

39 languages claim to be spoken in the United States. That would be true only if the criteria were extremely low. This low criteria hasn't been applied evenly, if it was, there would be 30+ languages in most developed countries. The criteria must be stated if the information is to be useful, and I suggest setting the criteria to a higher level. How about 1% of a countries population? Gronky 16:28, 2005 Jun 8 (UTC)

The whole thing is silly. I've removed a bunch of the sillier ones (and perhaps some less silly ones...) This should be a list of place where the language is spoken to a significant extent, not any place where somebody who speaks that language may live. john k 15:27, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• I dont know what silly data you removed, but the new data for Portuguese was even sillier, so I've altered the data for Portuguese and I hope you all do to other languages. I've putted the countries with official status plus where it is spoken by more than 1% of the population (this using: <small> </small> -Pedro 16:01, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

More: I've altered the number of speakers, but I didnt want to alter the countries order, so I've used the same number has the language that the article considers more spoken. Althought the number of port. speakers is a bit bigger, that languages can also have bigger numbers. -Pedro 16:03, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hey Pedro - as I said, I wasn't sure I'd done it completely well. That being said, I like the way you've done it, dividing between major countries where it is either spoken by most people or is an official language, and other countries where there are "significant communities." I'd suggest that we do this for all of them. As for what silly data I removed - Denmark and Germany as English-speaking countries? There was much else that was silly. john k 21:04, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Ok, we need the same for other languages! -Pedro 22:00, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've been going through and changing it - BTW, has anybody noticed the really strangely low numbers for Kurdish (called "Kurdi," giving it a red link, and how Turkey is not mentioned as a country where Kurds live?) john k 23:43, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Also, what are we to do with languages like Awadhi, which is often considered a dialect of Hindi? john k 23:47, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Kurdish - like Arabic - is divided into a load of different languages by the Ethnologue. Hence the numbers. No speaker of the Ethnologue's "Kurdi" lives in Turkey - it's the Iraqi dialect... Mustafaa 23:49, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but we give one Arabic, and one Farsi, even though those languages are also divided by Ethnologue. john k 23:57, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh, I wasn't endorsing Ethnologue! By all means change it. I'm just pointing out the source of the problem (and no doubt of other problems.) - Mustafaa 22:02, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Inconsistency in title

The article is headed "List of languages by total speakers", but it only actually makes reference to "Native total speakers". Shouldn't this be changed?

I dont think so. -Pedro 19:35, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes it should be changed. There are well over 341 million english speakers, many in countries where learning english as a second language is commonplace.

Speaking of which, I would be interested in seeing a table of language speakers all together, not just those who speak it natively. --tomf688^(talk) 22:24, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

Learning English doesnt mean English is a second language, there are several languages that people learn! Dont be biased. And learning English often means NOTHING. Most people wont speak it or will speak a very rudimentary version of English. Your idea is near the stupidity: because learning a language doesnt mean that the language is the second language of someone. People learn several languages, I would count for at least half a dozen! So stupid! Second language speakers are people who speak English in countries were English is an official language, but it isnt their first language. These people use English as a second language. -Pedro 23:10, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Um. Huh? --tomf688^(talk) 02:55, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)

Okay, a few points:

• A second language is any language that someone learns that is not their native laguage. If someone speaks spanish natively and learns english, french, and italian, then those last three are all second-languages.
• Yes I am biased by using english as an example. English is my native language, so I will naturally choose that.
• Saying that learning english "means NOTHING" is silly. Learning any language is beneficial.

I was just using english as an example anyways... calm down. --tomf688^(talk) 03:10, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)

• • Means nothing because: often people wont use it and forget it; and often people who learn it, will never speak it. And for many it will mean nothing in their lives. -Pedro 11:05, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• A better example why a LEARNING LANGUAGE is not the same as a SECOND LANGUAGE: Cape Verdeans have their native language, a creole, most speak Portuguese too (and speak it like natives, even if they arent), but many also speak french (teached as a foreign language), they learn it in school. Do you think that the status of Portuguese and French in Cape Verde is the same? No! Portuguese is used in school, in communication, in many fields but the creole is the "native language", Portuguese is the "second language" and French is the main "learning language".-Pedro 22:46, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree, the title doesn't match the content. Boraczek 09:13, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Pedro here. As another example - in India, many people (but a minority of the total population) learn English. In the Netherlands, a much larger percentage of the population learns English (I would guess). In neither case is it the people's first language. But to act as though learning English in the Netherlands is anything like as significant as learning it in India seems highly dubious to me. There is a difference between countries where the language of government is one which is not the native language of most people at the country; and the fact that people in a lot of, for instance, European countries learn English in school. It is comparing apples and oranges. john k 01:52, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This is confusing!

Somebody needs to sort out through all this and NUMBER these, so confusion doesn't arise. there are messed up listings, with one language being 96 for instance while the one just below it being 91. It would help if these languages were numbered. I didn't know what to put Haitian Creole's ranking as in its info box, so I just took a guess. Revolución 04:22, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree, a # column would help here Argyrios 01:32, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Italian and dialects

According to this article, Italian speakers are 62.000.000. Then it is said Lombard speakers are 8.000.000, Venetian 2.000.000 and so on. I am wondering: do you consider the speakers of Lombard also in the Italian speakers amount or not? I mean I live in Lombardy, I speak both Italian and a dialect of Lombard (yes, cause there are many Lombard dialects, mutually intellegible at least) but I consider Italian my first language. Do you consider me twice?

--Suhardian 19:18, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Should now be clearer. The figure includes 55 million first- and second-language speakers, out of an Italian population of 58 million, but Ethnologue says 'Possibly nearly half the population do not use Standard Italian as first language.' kwami 03:59, 2005 Jun 27 (UTC)

I don't know when Ethnologue was last updated, but the claim thay half the population do not use Standard Italian as a first language is outrageous. It may have been true in the thirthies, but it is definitely not true now.

I think that this page may be appreciated for the tentative. It is true that sources may vary. Concerning italian dialects and languages, one have to refer to the international standard classification ISO 639. This contains Sicilian language, Sardinian language, which are languages that are widely spoken in parts of Italy and with significant communities worldwide, but also Lombard language (ISO 639-3 code 'lmo). On the other hands, it is true that Lombardy have 8 million inhabitants, but this does not means that there are 8 millions speakers, and I am surprised if somebody claims it. Nevertheless, Lumbard is spoken by a significative community, and even if romantsch language, or Ladin are wellknown and wellcoded languages, with many similarities with Lombard, Lombard may be elegible as a language listed here. --Gmelfi July 21 2005.

What a mess

Oh, wonderful - now we've got everybody moving their favorite languages about at will. Until somebody finds an authoritative source, we should just leave the numbers as they were. And that means you, Punjabi. john k 01:48, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

javanese

More javanese speakers than indonesian and malay speakers. It can't be possible, javanese is not the official language. Also most of the people that talks javanese talks indonesian. I think they are bilingual so .....

What does the official language have to do with anything? At any rate, this is supposedly a list of first language speakers, in which case Javanese surely has more speakers than Indonesian.

john k 14:47, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, it has a lot to do with it. Firstly, this flawed concept of "first" and "second" languages has no bearing in a truly multilingual society. In Indonesia almost every primary school conducts instruction purely in Indonesian. If you move beyond 3rd grade, 100% of the schools in Indonesia use Indonesian. Officially, over 85% of the Indonesian population is literate in the Indonesian language, which translates to about 205 million literate speakers in Indonesian. Overall, at least 90% of the Indonesian population speaks the language. You take into account that 50% of Indonesia's population now lives in urban areas, and you are looking at a situation of at least 50 million "first" language speakers. In summary, the data on this page regarding Bahasa Indonesia is very flawed.

The whole concept of "Native Speakers" is dubious

Certainly most people in Indonesia have a local language which they speak at home, and the national language. But I've known Chinese who spoke Javanese at home, and I've also known a Javanese mother who taught her toddler Indonesian first, and then Javanese. It must be impossible to get accurate figures on who learns what language first - I should think that both languages should qualify as "native".

If someone is more comfortable speaking Javanese at home (as that toddler surely will be, pretty soon), it may also be a function of the type of language it is - a much older, more expressive and subtle language than Indonesian.

Sure it's interesting to compare native speakers, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that the figures can ever be accurate.

The figures for total speakers should be possible to do with more accuracy, I would think.

btw, am I the only person here who has no idea what "WA" refers to? It doesn't even show up on the Wikipedia page WA. Singkong2005 11:43, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

I think it means World Almanac.

Correct.

Actually, total speaker estimates are much less accurate than native speaker estimates. The latter are based on census and other survey data that ask which language people were raised with, or which they speak at home. (Granted, mother tongue and home language aren't always the same thing.) Some will be natively bilingual, such as the toddler you mentioned, if s/he's raised with both languages. However, it's much more difficult to estimate how many people in all speak a language. How good does your English have to be before you're considered an English speaker? Who decides on the standard, and how do we ensure the same standard is used for every language? kwami 09:01, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

using consistant figures

Since everyone seems to be complaining about where the data are coming from, and most of the languages have Ethnologue (15th ed.) as a source, I'm extending Ethnologue data to the major languages as well. (The credited source for this page, SIL, are the publishers of Ethnologue.) Another source would be fine, but mixing up sources without documentation will continue to be a mess. Coupla points:

• I broke up Punjabi, because Lahnda and Gurmukhi are closer to other languages on this list than they are to each other.
• However, I did not attempt to break up Chinese or Arabic into individual languages. I also did not verify the speaker data for Chinese, as I cannot find an Ethologue total for all Sinitic languages.
• I unified Hindustani and Malay.
• However, I did not unify some of the smaller mutually intelligible dialects, like Czech/Slovak.
• Swahili's now at the very bottom, with 0.7 million native speakers. However, I think this must be wrong: more likely it's 0.7 million ethnic Swahili, as others have certainly adopted the language, especially in the cities. The number of second language speakers is rural, so it may be an underestimate as well.

kwami 03:52, 2005 Jun 27 (UTC)

• I think that abritary decision of unified and spliting is not very neutral.

A Portuguese can read Galician with some difficulty but can, but an Urdu can't read Hindi. Portuguese and Galician are splitted, Urdu and hindi united?!?!?! I think languages with massive writing differences and historical disconnection shoud be separated. And that includes Hindi/Urdu. Portuguese/Galician... and other similar, dispite their limited mutual inteligebility in the spoken or written form. I dont know what is the problem of Czech and Slovak... The problem of Chinese and Arabic is still in debate. These share a unified writing system, but they seem to be separated from the spoken language. Languages are a mess because of politics and academics with tendencies (political, lack of knowladge, prejudice). -Pedro 1 July 2005 16:02 (UTC)

If I started writing English in the Arabic alphabet due to my faith, and you couldn't read it, should I then claim that we speak different languages? Of course not. Likewise, Cherokee is written in both its own script and the Latin, but is a single language nonetheless. Hindi and Urdu are two national standards of what are essentially the same language. They use different scripts, and different technical vocabulary, but the day-to-day language is very similar. In India, illiterate people will claim to speak Hindi or Urdu based on their religion — that is, the difference has little to do with how they actually speak. (Of course, the literate are educated with different standards, but what they speak at home doesn't change much because of that.) From a linguistic standpoint, they speak the same language (if perhaps different registers or dialects) because they can understand each other without (much) problem. Writing is superficial. For most of us, most of the time, language is speech. That's its essence, not writing. Similarly, Taiwanese Mandarin and mainland Mandarin speakers cannot read each other's texts, because of the simplification of the writing system on the mainland. Should Mandarin then be considered two separate languages?

(BTW, Mandarin speakers cannot read Cantonese, or can read it only with difficulty. The Chinese languages do not share a unified writing system; rather, the Chinese people all read and write Mandarin, with a few exceptions such as Hong Kong comic books and American Chinatown newspapers. Claiming this makes them a single language is a bit like claiming Middle Korean is a Chinese dialect because in the 14th century, the Korean people read and wrote in Chinese.)

I agree that the data are inconsistant. Ethnologue is inconsistant. What we really need to do is to test all of the world's major languages. Any people that can communicate with each other at, say, FSI level 3 or above would be counted as speaking the same language, whatever the politicians say. Any "language" where people cannot communicate at that level would be split up. This has been done for some languages, such as the Mayan languages of Guatemala. However, I have never heard of anyone doing the research and applying a uniform standard to the whole planet. Until someone does, we're stuck with making educated guesses and fudging things in an attempt to be consistant. Maybe Portuguese and Galician should be unified. I considered that, but I know little Portugese and no Galician, so I left it alone. Likewise, perhaps several of the Scandinavian languages should be unified. Arabic should be split up, but I am not the one to decide how. It would be nice to use a common definition as to what is a 'language' for all entries on the list. The changes I made are a start in that direction, but there's still a lot to do. kwami 2005 July 5 07:45 (UTC)

• I would like to point out that the chinese dialects are largely mutually unintelligible due to phonetics and the expressions that are commonly used and (in the case of taiwanese) influence from other languages. Yes, if pressed, you can guess at the meanings of some of the words but it would take you a loooooong time and is not suitable for normal conversation. On the other hand, the two writing systems (slightly different forms of the characters) really quite similar if you understand the derivations of the simplified forms and most well educated Chinese or foreigner advanced enough in the language can read both forms fluently.you don't "read cantonese" because the basic writing system has been unified for centuries due to necessity for official communication between the captial and the provinces. In all, chinese can really be classified as seperate languages in the list if you like. However, Chinese when classed in the list of languages is a real bother because most chinese can speak both mandarin and their own dialect (though in the case of overseas chinese, like here in australia, many speak only either their own dialect or mandarin). And both mandarin and the dialect are spoken with "first language" status though technical discussions often tend to be in mandarin due to lack of advance vocabulary in dialects so do we count each person twice? Another point you can note is that in korea and vietnam, once both under chinese rule, the officials and educated elite spoke both korean or vietnamese and chinese (a different dialect was the norm then) while writing both their native language and chinese in the chinese script which eventually caused assimilation of chinese vocabulary and structure into these two languages. Yet, they are still unintelligible to each other and to the chinese dialects. So, if these two languages can be classified as languages in their own right, the dialects of chinese should theoretically be able to be classified as seperate but they are not due to fears of this validifying independence movements in china by the central communist government. Therefore, I think the statistics on this page can on the whole be said to be irrelevant and all it is really useful for is to indicate which languages are the most commonly spoken. Kenkoo1987 12:15, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Wait, you unified Hindustani and Malay?? Huh?? john k 5 July 2005 02:54 (UTC)

From personal experience, it's as easy or easier to switch from Malaysian to Indonesian Malay than from American to British English, so yes, Malay's clearly a single language (or rather, the two official standards are, whatever the status of their many regional forms). As for Hindustani, as above. kwami

Oh...you mean you joined together Indonesian and Malay, and also joined together Hindi and Urdu. I thought you were saying you joined Hindustani with Malay, which you must admit would be crazy. Were you the one who joined Czech and Slovak, as well? In terms of Arabic, I'd strongly advise against splitting it up. john k 5 July 2005 18:05 (UTC)

I believe I did. I haven't gotten to most of the smaller languages, so it's still a bit of a mess.

To be consistant, Arabic should be split up. Either that or merge Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, and Italian into a single language, and do with same with Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czechoslovak, Serbocroatian, and Bulgarian. Many forms of Arabic do not have functional intelligibility with each other, which the Slavic languages almost do. Perhaps we could also list Standard Arabic, which has a good 100 million speakers (or more) even though it has no native speakers. But, like I said, I'm not the one to do this, at least not without a better reference than Ethnologue.

I imagine that a primary use of this list is to answer the question, 'If I learn language X, how many people will I be able to communicate with?' We imply that learning 'Arabic' will allow you to communicate with 450 million, which is an exageration. kwami 2005 July 5 18:44 (UTC)

That is the question I'm interested in (as a language learner). However, a count of native speakers doesn't answer this question, as 2nd language speakers can be important (e.g. Indonesia.) See my comment above, The whole concept of "Native Speakers" is dubious.

I'd like to see a page with a different ranking, focused on exactly that question: 'If I learn language X, how many people will I be able to communicate with?' Some of the Scandanavian languages could be grouped together, for example. There'd have to be a distinction made between languages or dialects which are easily mutually intelligible, and ones where basic communication is possible , but there's significant differences. Perhaps Spanish and Portuguese would be an example of the latter. Singkong2005 11:59, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

A couple of points: 1) written languages - Arabic forms all share a common written language - the colloquial forms do not have their own standardized written forms. This is quite in contrast to the Romance and Slavic languages. It is more like the case with Chinese (which is, admittedly, divided up now). 2) Political facts - the basic fact is that there is no simply way to define what a language is. In some cases, political distinctions are silly. Whatever the Moldovan government may call it, the language that they speak is virtually identical with Romanian. But it gets a lot more difficult as you go towards finer distinctions. The Scandinavian languages are all, in my understanding, mutually intelligible. But they have long separate histories, and are considered to be separate languages. I don't see what is to be gained from merging them. The basic fact is that we simply cannot be consistent based on linguistic criteria, because political criteria are nearly important. Obviously, Swedish and Danish are a lot closer to each other, and more mutually comprehensible, than Moroccan Arabic and Iraqi Arabic are to one another. But politically, Danes and Swedes insist that their languages are separate, while Moroccans and Iraqis insist that their languages are the same. That has to count for something. john k 5 July 2005 20:01 (UTC)

There's a very simple way to define what a language is: put two people in a room, and see if they can communicate effectively, the same way you would test if someone is a fluent non-native speaker. Moldovan is, of course, Romanian. As for Scandinavian, not all dialects are functionally intelligible (to the point of some people being clueless as to what others are saying), but the distinctions don't follow national boundaries very well. We have two definitions of language here: social/political and linguistic. Both are important, of course, but neither is absolute: I know Moroccans who say they speak a different language than Standard Arabic, and certainly different from Iraqi, and Danes who say their language is essentially the same as Norwegian (or some dialects of it, at least).

Hacing looked into Arabic, I will note, for reference, that these are the divisions of Arabic with more than one million speakers given by Ethnologue:

• Egyptian Spoken Arabic – 44,406,000
• Algerian Spoken Arabic – 21,097,000
• Moroccan Spoken Arabic – 19,480,600
• Sudanese Spoken Arabic – 18,986,000
• Sa’idi Spoken Arabic – 18,900,000
• Mesopotamian Spoken Arabic – 15,100,000
• North Levantine Spoken Arabic – 14,309,537
• Najdi Spoken Arabic – 9,863,520
• Tunisian Spoken Arabic – 9,247,800
• Sanaani Spoken Arabic – 7,600,000
• Ta’izzi-Adeni Spoken Arabic – 6,869,000
• North Mesopotamian Spoken Arabic – 6,300,000
• South Levantine Spoken Arabic – 6,145,000
• Hijazi Spoken Arabic – 6,000,000
• Libyan Spoken Arabic – 4,505,000
• Hassaniyya – 2,787,625
• Gulf Spoken Arabic – 2,338,600
• Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Spoken Arabic – 1,610,000

(john k 5 July 2005 20:52 (UTC))

• I agree with you John. Although the behaviour of these governments is rather political than linguistical.

Case of the Romance languages: Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are not that similar as it may look sometimes. These languages diverge in their base. But share the same past and most lexicon (the middle ages did a mess to the uniformity of these language - and also French - it is not that divergent from the other as it may look - Romanian is the most different- I don't understand almost nothing of it - I have no difficulties in understand most Romance languages.), that's why it is not hard for a speaker of one language to learn the other very fastly. And, a normal person can understand something of the other language (but not enough to make an medium dialog). the relation between Portuguese and Galician is different, these have the same base, but sociolinguistically these form two different languages, they have different and independent ortographies, the government say the languages are different.

examples:

English "The house and the cat"

spanish "la casa y el gato"

Galician "a casa e o gato"

Portuguese "a casa e o gato"

English "The image of the house"

Spanish "La imagen de la casa"

Galician "A imaxe da casa"

Portuguese "A imagem da casa"

Portuguese and Galician diverge in termination, plus Galician retains old Portuguese characteristics, such as:

EN: two - thing - all the (fem.)

GL: dous - cousa - todalas

PT: dois - coisa - todas as

Portuguese and Galician also diverge in other terminations such as: PT: -ão GL: -ón PT: -vel GL: ble, etc. Although the Galician pronunciation is still found in Northern Portugal, where it is seen as part of the local dialects. Galician dialects are very influenced by Spanish and it seems like portuñol, while other dialects like those of rural people (especially from the border), and those of Galician fishermen (even in places as far as A Coruña) which are remakably familiar (I'm talking about accents now). There are also large ortographical differences: the Portuguese "J" and "G" (i.e. ge, gi) is the Galician "X", it isnt a significant difference in the speech but written it is a big difference. other differences are the Galician "ñ" and "ll" and Portuguese "nh" and "lh" - just ortographical differences without differences in the speech. Both populations also tend to see both dialects as different languages. So as you can see, the case is complex. And I've no prespectives on fusion, most Galicians aren't like Catalans or the Basque people in the protection of their culture. Plus, the language is more similar to Spanish than Catalan. -Pedro 5 July 2005 23:24 (UTC)

I advise keeping Arabic together, if only out of practicality. Arabic is a dialect continuum to an extent that Chinese simply isn't, and there really is no well-defined way to determine dialect boundaries (let alone count the speakers of each dialect); the Ethnologue's splits massively exceed anything that mutual intelligibility could justify (Algerian and Moroccan and Tunisian, for example, are totally mutually intelligible) and mutual intelligibility is itself currently in flux, as a result of the spread of pan-Arab mass media in recent decades. - Mustafaa 7 July 2005 22:09 (UTC)

What happened to Esperanto?

On the "Esperanto language" part of this website, it clearly says that there are about 1.6 million speakers. So, why isn't it on the list?

Esperanto has only a thousand or so native speakers, so it's well below the cutoff by even the most optimistic accounts. (I have a suspicion that Swahili's above a million, and that the Ethnologue figures are wrong, but that needs confirmation. Meanwhile Swahili has been left on the list.)

That's assuming this list is based on the number of native speakers. If it's based on total speakers, then by all means let's add Esperanto. kwami 2005 July 5 07:45 (UTC)

Is there a page here containing lists language in general? Some languages were not ment to be spoken as a first language...

There are a couple lists, which aren't very well distinguished. There's a List of the most spoken native languages, and this list, which is for 'total speakers', by which was meant to be 'total number of native speakers'. Not sure how that's supposed to be different from the previous one. Either they should be merged, or they should cover separate topics. (Personally, I think they should be merged regardless.) I've started adding second language speakers (even if I haven't gotten to most) because that fits the title. If you want to turn this list into a true List of languages by total speakers, and include every language spoken by more than 1M, go ahead, though it might be polite to discuss it here first. However, we should add more than just Esperanto, and I don't think I'm up to the task! kwami 2005 July 7 19:01 (UTC)

Up to 15 million people can speak Esperanto if that means anything.Cameron Nedland 02:20, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

More Dutch speakers

I would say about 23 million people speak Dutch rahter than 20 million:

• Netherlands 16 million
• Belgium 6 million
• Suriname, Antilles, other communities 1 million
• total 23 million

[anonymous] I don't know where you get those numbers, where comes the 1 million number? population:

• Antilles 212,226
• Aruba 103,000
• Suriname 438,144

the population of these three regions doesnt reach one million, and Dutch is definetly not a national language in these places. Plus, the Netherlands and Belgium have a lot of immigrants. So I belive more in the 20 million figure, rather than the 23 million one.-Pedro 5 July 2005 11:27 (UTC)

There are for example probably about 12 million native speakers in the Netherlands, once you sutract immigrants, Frisian, Limburgish, and other Germanic language speakers. Suriname definitely isn't natively Dutch speaking; some of the languages there are closer to English (if you can even recognize gbe for 'leave' as derived from English!). So 20 million may be a rather generous number. kwami 2005 July 5 17:50 (UTC)

60% of the Belgians were Dutch speaking in 1960. The population is now 10M. Thus the 6M figure above. This assumes that the ratio of Dutch to French has stayed constant, but French has been gaining. Brussels, for example, is now predominantly French speaking. It also does not take into account the many immigrants who are not native Dutch speakers. So 6M is a generous figure. We have ~12M in the Netherlands, ~6M in Belgium, with other countries insignificant considering the errors in these two figures: 200k in Suriname (natively bilingual in Dutch), 5k in Aruba, 4k in the Dutch Antilles, 80k in France, 101k in Germany, = 0.39M total. A 1990 WA figures has only 4,620,150 in Belgium; a 2000 Ethnologue estimate has 12,360,338 in the Netherlands and 17,370,777 total. So 17M. Since practically all Dutch citizens as fluent in Dutch, we have close to 4M second speakers there, plus and unknown number in Belgium and the Caribbean. kwami 22:50, 2005 August 20 (UTC)

Don't think that has changed much. While it is true that the number of Dutch speakers in the Brussels region decreased since the 60ies, that is offset by the fact that most immigrants settled in the Dutch speaking areas, because Flandres became the economical powerhouse of Belgium. While Belgium didn't release any data on language use since the 1960ies, the EU did. The most recent data is that 57 % of the Belgians have Dutch as mother tongue and 39 % French (http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union). Not that different from the 1960ies.

--Lucius1976 22:05, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Dutch is the Official language in the Dutch Antilles, Aruba and Surinam (Just like Frenh is in for example Senegal). But it is through that is only the second languages for most speakers there. As far as Dutch speakers in Holland. According to the Dutch Census bureau The Netherlands has got 1.6 million first generation immigrants. Those immigrants do propably not speak Dutch as their first languages. But their children (second generation immigrants) do. In Friesland only 350.000 people speak Fries as their mothertonque the rest does speak Dutch. And not every person in Limburg does speak Limburgs either. So propbably 2,5 million inhabitants of the Netherlands do not speak Dutch as native speakers and as The Netherlands got 16.3 million inhabitants the total amount of Dutch native speakers should be almost 14 million. I like to point out that Suriname has recently joined the Dutch language union, along with the Netherlands and Flanders (the northern part of Belgium). By doing this a lot of words from the Surinam dialects are now recognized to be truely Dutch.

The minority language speakers of the Netherlands can for 100% be counted as a Dutch speaking population. Why? Because everyone who speaks Low-Saxon, Limbourgish or Frisian also speaks Dutch. They read their newspapers in Dutch, they hear the news on radio and television in Dutch, their education is for the most part in Dutch, etc. Everyone of these groups is a bilingual. If you are to look for someone who only speaks Low-Saxon, Frisian or Limbourgish, and who is unable to understand or express themselves in standard Dutch, you will find no more than a few hundred people, mostly in homes for the elderly.

That's not the point. We're talking about mother-tongue speakers, as with all other languages on the list. kwami 12:48, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

That IS the point, these people are not simply mothertongue speakers of their respective minority languages and fluent in Dutch, they are 100% bilingual, Dutch is also their mothertongue. Besides, if speakers of Low-Saxon are not included as Dutch speakers, why is Low Saxon not seperataly mentioned in this list?

The EU states 23 million native speakers of Dutch within the EU. As long as someone doesn't come up with data from other surveys I just assume that data as accurate. http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union

--Lucius1976 21:36, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good. Could you provide the reference? kwami 08:26, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_237.en.pdf --Lucius1976 09:41, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, but I can't find the 23M figure in either of your refs. The 57% figure is good to have, though. kwami 20:13, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

You will find it there, but just as a percentage. But, for that you need to know the population of the EU (460 million) --Lucius1976 10:10, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

So we're assuming that the number of Dutch speakers outside the EU is so small that it doesn't matter.

If I remember correctly, that figure was 5%. That corresponds to a population of 21-25 million. It would be nice to have a more precise figure, but I suppose we could use a range, as we do in other articles. kwami 13:22, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, believe the authors do have more precise figures, but neglected to put it into the document. Ranges are find, in the number of second language speakers even more appropriate. Exact figures are hard to believe. --Lucius1976 16:25, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Germany is not listed...

Am I the only one who noticed Germany's absence? It's definitely in the top 100...

Standard German is currently at #10. kwami 2005 July 5 07:45 (UTC)

• Why standard German? The Language is known as German! -Pedro 5 July 2005 11:20 (UTC)

Because it does not include many lects that are also known as German: various forms of Saxon, Swiss, etc. "German", as the word is commonly used in English, isn't really a language. I put a note in with the numbers instead, parallel to other languages. kwami 2005 July 5 17:53 (UTC)

That is inconsistent. Either you lump or your split throughout. But I see that the many Chinese dialects are counted as one language, and that the many version of English, including such extremes as Jamaican and (implicitly) Texan, are all lumped as "English" and their speakers counted. By the same standards, you can't exclude the German speakers of Switzerland or Northern Germany. All of them use standard German as their written standard, and the majority of them are able to speak it. 213.73.117.218 05:03, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

• However, and correct me if i am wrong, i do believe that the form of German taught in schools across german speaking regions is standardized and all germans would understand german as learnt by a second language speaker. so, it would be much more practical to group german as a single language. Kenkoo1987 12:26, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Although the vast majority of Germans, as well as most people in Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Lichtenstein understand High German (De: Hochdeutsch) from School and the media, it is not the language they use at home. Many of the dialects are mutually unintelligible without training. Swiss children, for example, before they learn High German, cannot understand it. So the native language speaker count is correct, and the second language speaker count includes people like the Swiss.

That is true of all major languages. They all have dialects besides the written standard, some mutually unintelligible. But the list doesn't apparently count these separately for e.g. English or Chinese. Why use a different standard for German? BTW, the use of dialects has levelled off considerably in the past decades. Everyday language is now often an intermediate form between standard and dialect, and even many people have grown up with standard German as their mother tongue. (Switzerland is an exception to this development). 213.73.117.218 05:03, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

That is correct. For reference please have a look at the German spelling reform of 1996 that "is based on an international agreement signed in 1996 by the governments of the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. Luxembourg". 80.134.115.152 11:17, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Why does German not include Swiss German in this list?

Good question. I would include it. Because Swiss German is no proper language - no written standard - it can be subsummarized under German. While it is true that Swiss German is quite differently to Standard German, many dialect of German (Austra-Bavarian) are so as well. Maybe not to the extent as in Swiss German, but nevertheless. It isn't so that only Swiss German is the spoken mother tongue while Standard German the spoken standard. To some degree that is true for every region in the German speaking area. In most regions, expecially the center or southern regions, proper Standard German is rarely spoken at home. While everyone can speak it, many don't do it. Rather they speak a mixture of Standard German and dialect. Some of course speak just dialect at home. I would include the numbers for Swiss German as well. Has the nice side effect that German gets over the 100 million limit :-) --Lucius1976 10:05, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Persian is listed incorrectly

The total # for Persian speakers is very incorrect. No speakers of Persian as a second language in Iran are listed (giving a false total number), and may I remind all that Dari (Afghanistan's official language) is in fact Persian. It's not even a dialect of Persian. It is Persian. It is also the 2nd langaueg in Tajikestan and some other areas in Central Asia.--Zereshk 6 July 2005 10:41 (UTC)

• It seems a dialect of Persian:

The syntax of Afghanistan's Persian does not differ greatly from Iran's Persian (locally called Farsi), but the stress accent is less prominent in Afghanistan's Persian than in Iran's Persian. To mark attribution, spoken Afghan Persian uses the suffix -ra. The vowel system also differs from that of Iranian Persian, to some degree. I guess you are using the term dialect to refer to a similar language without a writing system.-Pedro 6 July 2005 11:37 (UTC)

There is far far more difference between the English spoken in Australia, the UK, and The US, than the difference between Persian in Afghanistan and Persian in Iran. There is far more difference between the Persian spoken in Tehran and that of Yazd, than Iran and Afghanistan.

Either you have to break up Persian into its various dialects that vary from town to town in Iran (and therefore not list Persian at all on the list here), or list it correctly.

I vote for the latter. Dari is Farsi (Persian). And I have been schooled in Persian as my mother tongue.--Zereshk 6 July 2005 14:27 (UTC)

How different is Tajik? I agree that both Afghan and Iranian Persian should be listed together. john k 6 July 2005 15:31 (UTC)

As literary standards, Farsi & Dari may be identical, but as spoken languages, they differ. However, as far as I know, there is no interuption in intelligibility between local varieties of "Farsi", "Dari", and "Tajiki", and the real distinction is political. The question is whether the geographic extremes can understand each other - maybe a bit like Italian? Also, if we're going on Ethnologue numbers, make sure Hazaragi is included.

Few of the languages listed include numbers of non-native speakers, so it's not just Persian. kwami 2005 July 6 17:53 (UTC)

1. Im not sure about the current status of the Tajik since Tajikestan was heavily Russified by The USSR. But I am pretty sure about Afghanistan.
2. Almost every language listed above Persian gives the total figure by adding the 2nd langauge speakers to the native ones. If we do that, we can get the following rough number for Persian language speakers (Native and Non Native), according to the CIA Factbook, by the following formula, as of 2005, not including Tajikestan:

Total = [N + NN in Iran] + [50% of Afghanistan] + [10% of the UAE] + [a conservative estimate for Iranian expatriates in Canada, the US, and Europe]

= 68,017,860 + 0.5(29,928,987) + 0.1(2,563,212 ) + 1,000,000

= 84,238,675

Note: Add to this figure 7,163,506 if Tajikestan is decided to be added. See Tajik language for aiding your decision. Also add same minority from Uzbekistan.--Zereshk 6 July 2005 22:25 (UTC)

• my POV: Honestely, I'm shocked to see that there are so many problems around with several languages, why doesnt the UN or UNESCO creates something like "The human languages rights", to pretect the unity of languages against political intervenction. A language porpouse is just for comunication not to be used as a weapon or for nationalistic bias. Just my 2 cents. -Pedro 7 July 2005 22:58 (UTC)

Final formula for Persian re-estimate

This new estimate will add the first language and second language speakers of Persian, similar to other languages on the table. Estimates are according to 2005 CIA population figures:

34,689,168 + 33,328,751 (1st + 2nd language speakers in Iran according to CIA)

+ 14,964,494 (the 50% of Afghans that speak Dari according to CIA as main language)

+ 3,437,000 (Total estimate of Diaspora in US, Turkey, UAE, Iraq, Germany, UK, Canada, France, India, Australia, Syria, Russia)[2]

-----------

Native Total = 53,090,614

Non Native Total = 33,328,751

Grand Total = 86,419,365

Note:

1. The Tajik have not been included in this estimate. I dont know whether to include them or not. Their language is Persian, but their script has been cyrillicized I understand.
2. The diaspora figure, although based on not the best of sources, is a good estimate. Ive seen other estimates of the Iranian diaspora. They are in the same exact range. In fact the Baptist estimate is conservative, since it doesnt mention Iranians living in Israel (both the President and Defense Min of Israel are Iranian)
3. I vote that this new total figure be inserted into the list. --Zereshk 7 July 2005 21:59 (UTC)

I believe the 50% figure for Afghanistan is not the number of native speakers. Afghanistan is about 50% Pashtun, and there are other ethnicities as well. Persian is (if I remember correctly) somewhere around 30%. 'Main language' includes lots of people who speak some other language locally or at home, but use Persian when communicating outside of their group. kwami 2005 July 7 22:17 (UTC)

I only quoted the CIA website directly where it says of Afghanistan: Language: Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 50%, Pashtu (official) 35%, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11%, 30 minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai) 4%. And besides, even the Pashtun are Iranian as well, and their language a Persian dialect.--Zereshk 7 July 2005 22:30 (UTC)

"Iranian" does not mean "Persian". Honestly, that was the main reason for changing the name of Persia to Iran! Saying Pashtun is a dialect of Persian because they're both Iranian is like saying English is a dialect of German because they're both Germanic.

I'm not so sure the CIA is any better as a source than Ethnologue. The Wikipedia article for Afghanistan lists Pashtun 42%, Tajik (Persian) 27%, Hazara (Persian) 9%, Uzbek 9%, Aimak (Persian) 4%, Turkmen 3%, Baloch 2%, other 4% (these are also CIA figures, actually). That puts Persian speakers at 40%, assuming that language follows ethnicity. If Pashtun is spoken by only 35%, then ~20% of Pashtuns have given up their language, which I'd like to see stated explicitly in a reliable source before accepting. In the Afghan demongraphy article, it states that "Dari is spoken by more than one-third of the population as a first language and serves as a lingua franca for most Afghans", consistant with the ethnic figures, but elsewhere says that it's the language of 50% (also a CIA figure).

Native: 51% of Iran (68M), 40% of Afghanistan (30M), 80% of Tajikistan (7.2M), 5% of Uzbekistan (27M), = 53.8M.

Your source lists 350k in the UAE, but Ethnologue has only 80k specifically Persian speakers. Perhaps your source is counting all Iranians? Likewise, 500k instead of 800k for Turkey, 230k for Iraq (equivalent), 90k Germany (equivalent), 900k USA (rather than 1.5M). Also about a million Dari in Pakistan weren't counted, and 40k Tajik in Russia (not significant). This gives a total native speaking population of ~57M, somewhat above your estimate. As for non-native speakers, we can assume that most of the remaining population of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan speak Persian fluently: That's about 44M, assuming half of non-Persian Afghans are fluent, which is just a guess on my part (I've heard that many Pashtun do not speak Dari well, especially women). So the total would be somewhere around 100M speakers. Of course, this is a rough estimate, and will vary significantly depending on how many Afghans speak Dari fluently. If all did, we'd have just a tad under 110M, which therefore is the upper limit.

Oops, I got signed out again, and only my IP address appeared as a signature. Do the rest of you have that problem, of only being able to sign in for a few minutes at a time?

Anyway, I believe that a significant number of that 1M refugees in Pakistan have now gone home, or am I wrong? The ethnic total was under 57M anyway, so given this uncertainty, maybe we should count it as 56M? —kwami 2005 July 8 03:31 (UTC)

Final formula for Persian re-estimate -- Part 2

1. I think it is better to avoid counting the Afghan refugees in Pakistan (1M) and Iran (2M). Sooner or later they will go back, and the figures will be revised accordingly.
2. Ethnologue's estimates of Iranians in the UAE is outdated. There has been a masive flux of Iranians migrating to the UAE in the past 10 years. Even the CIA puts the Iranian population currently at roughly 250,000 in Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi. I think the 350,000 is therefore well accurate.
3. However, Ethnologue does mention Oman and Qatar, which I didnt count.
4. I think that Kwami is right. We should consider putting 40% of Afghanistan's population as native speakers. However I do think we should count the rest of Afghanistan as 2nd language speakers, since it is the official language of the country anyway.

Hence the revised estimate (according to the combined sources of Ethnologue, CIA, and [3] ) is:

34,689,168 + 33,328,751 (1st + 2nd language speakers in Iran according to CIA)

11,971,595 + 17,957,393 (40% Afghans that speak Dari as main language + rest that speak it as second language)

1,000,000 in Pakistan (according to Ethnologue)

3,535,000 (Total estimate of Iranian diaspora in US, Turkey, UAE, Iraq, Germany, UK, Canada, France, India, Australia, Syria, Russia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Israel)

1,181,452 (Tajiks in Uzbekistan)

5,723,641 + 1,439,865 (1st + 2nd language speakers in Tajikestan according to CIA)

-----------

Native Total = 58,100,856

Non Native Total = 52,726,009

Grand Total = 110,826,865

Should we go ahead with this number?--Zereshk 8 July 2005 09:30 (UTC)

This seems like an acceptable number to me. SouthernComfort 8 July 2005 10:52 (UTC)

I thought we were going to avoid the 1M refugees in Pakistan? That's what the number in Ethnologue is from. (Was the population estimate for Afghanistan revised downward to reflect the refugees, or are they being counted twice?) Also, we should round off to the nearest million. Our estimates differ by tens of millions, so indicating thousands is silly.

Also, just because Dari is official in Afghanistan, that doesn't mean everyone speaks it. Pashtun is also official. Probably 99% of the population speaks one of those two languages, but I'd be more comfortable if we had some evidence for the actual number of Dari speakers, rather than just assuming it's universal. Rather like French in Canada: we wouldn't want to count the entire country as French speakers just because it's official. (As far as I know, even reading common knowledge stuff like Nat Geo, there are large segments of the Pashtun population that don't speak Dari.) kwami 2005 July 9 18:17 (UTC)

If Ethnologue's 1 Million Pakis are the refugees (which I thought they werent), then they should be taken off, which they have, as I can see. However Dari is more official than Pashtu. This is according to the Afghanistan page, the CIA, and the fact that the official language in Kabul and the govt of Karzai (a Pashtu himself) is Dari. --Zereshk 00:53, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

I can find nothing in either of those sources supporting your claim that "Dari is more official than Pashtu". They are co-official, as near as I can tell. From what I understand, Dari is more widely used as a second language than Pashtun is. However, in the Wikipedia Dari (Afghanistan) article, it says that 60% of Afghans speak Dari, 12M less than we have now, and the total for Persian would be just under 100M. I don't know the source for the Dari article's data, but we shouldn't claim that all Afghans speak it without evidence. kwami 01:32, 2005 July 10 (UTC)

National Geographic 2004 [4] breaks down the ethnic composition as "Pashtun (38 percent), Tajik (25 percent), Hazara (19 percent), and Uzbek (6 percent)". Another 4% Aimak (itself not a very reliable figure) would indeed put the native Persian-speaking total at almost half: 48%. So our figures range from "over a third" to "50%" and everything in between, and we have no data for the number of non-native speakers. (It's an assumption that all Iranians and Tajiks speak Persian, but not an unreasonable one. It is unreasonable in the case of Afghanistan.) We really need some reliable data, if it exists. kwami 01:53, 2005 July 10 (UTC)

Here's a 2001 source from Human Rights Watch that seconds NatGeo's figures: [5]. Another, here, has 46-48% (with the number of Aimaq uncertain). However, these figures are calculated from a 1995 census estimate of only 17 million! By their own admission, that's way off, and makes me doubt the NatGeo figures. kwami

1. The Afghanistan embassy in Canada names Dari as the "lingua franca" [6]
2. I still think the CIA is more accurate and up to date than any other available source. It is credible enough (see their contributors). What is interesting is that it lists Persian native speakers at 58% of the population in Iran. That would add another 5.4 million to the current 57 million. And they do list 50% for Dari speakers. Therefore, it seems the 57 million is quite an underestimate.--Zereshk 23:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

First, "lingua franca" doesn't mean everyone speaks it. I've been in plenty of countries where I've gone to the market, and the market women don't speak the national lingua franca. Second, the CIA isn't a very credible source. Did you know that the UK only became an independent country in 1809? That is, according the the CIA factsheet, before a British journalist pointed out their error to them. It appears that the 50% figures are from ten years ago, when Afghanistan was reported to have only half the population it does now. Many of the missing were presumably refugees, many of them Pashtun. Many of the rest were simply not counted, and who knows who they were. All we can say is that somewhere between 35% and 50% of the population speaks Dari natively, and a large but unknown number speak it as a second language. kwami 23:28, 2005 July 10 (UTC)

• Still, they dont list Pastho as the Lingua Franca. And why do I see Dari on the front pages of Afghan official websites instead of Pasthu?
• And u still have to account for the deficient 5.4M which the CIA lists for 2005, which is quite plausible.--Zereshk 23:44, 10 July 2005 (UTC)