Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers/Archive 6

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Hindi, Arabic, and macrolanguages

Arabic is a macrolanguage, meaning that its dialects are not all mutually intelligible. However, since it is impossible to classify what constitutes mutual intelligibility, Arabic as a macrolanguage is (rightly) left on this list. We are have to use conventional definitions, particularly macrolanguages.

Why then is Hindi, as a macrolanguage itself, divided up into its constituent sociolects? The list only uses the Khariboli dialect, but I can guarantee that many forms of Hindi are closer than say, Moroccan and Saudi Arabic. Why not accept people's self-identification as speakers as the Hindi dachsprache? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.181.76.47 (talk) 07:37, 3 December 2009 (UTC) How do you propose to classify macrolanguages? Is Chinese (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, etc.) also a macrolanguage? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.242.176.64 (talk) 18:26, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Better measurement

Because of how crazy this page seems to be, shouldn't we just change the study or change the page from the number of native speakers to the number of overall speakers? I really thought it was pert to claim that the SIL was the definitive source. James (talk) 05:06, 28 July 2008 (UTC

Korean Total Speaker population is 80-88 Million. Not 78 or 79 Million.

Impossible task

What this page seems to do does not seem part of what an encyclopedia should be about. That is to exaplin what a mother tongue speaker is, native speaker, take into account that people may be poly glot and that language use is not simple. It confuses written with spoken language and does not cover the aspects of L1, L2 and L3 use of a language. It does not recognize that a person can learn a language in 3 years and then might live the rest of their life in that language nor that an immigrant may use English all the time in their new country but still their native language might be something else that they very rarely use. It also seekls to use established sources, that cannot be due to population changes and censuses being every 10 years EVER upto date. Lastly political and ideoilogical reasons for supporting a language are not also considered and this means that figures are not reliable. Some of the comments below do not seem to show an awareness of what the difference between a dialect and a language actually is - The mutual intelligibility to the closests to a standard form means a language and a dialect is less intelligiubility. Non understanding makes a new language, what ever you call it.In short this can never meet the objectives and is not a useful task unless wikipedia wants lots of trolling. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.197.64.194 (talk) 18:21, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Languages, or Language Families?

KOREAN LANGUAGE IS SPOKEN BY 80-88 MILLION. PLEASE UPDATE THE FACTUAL NUMBER PLEASE!! DEEPLY APPRECIATE IT. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Americanprofessor (talk • contribs) 13:59, 25 April 2008 (UTC) Korean language is not isolated language its related to Altaic. Total Korean speaking population is about 80 million. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Korea4one (talk • contribs) 12:53, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Korean is part of a "family" but in no way is Korean not really an isolated language.Japxican (talk) 19:20, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

The entire organization of this whole page is rediculous. Aside from dubious statistics, why are certain languages being counted as entities they are not. Chinese and Arabic are not languages, Mandarin and Standard Arabic are. Its odd that "Chinese", which encompasses dialects so different speakers from one region are cannot understand speakers from another, is one language while Italian and Spanish, languages whos speakers readily understand eachother, are counted separately. The large language blocks should be divided.

--DigitalA 04:11, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Chinese is separated on this page. I'm not sure how you missed it? Rysten 19:09, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Languages are defined based on political, rather than linguistic criteria. Speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin consider themselves to be native speakers of the same language. So, certainly, do Arabic-speakers (and in that case, dialects are very poorly defined). The same cannot be said of Spanish-speakers and Italian-speakers. john k 19:39, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

I guess a line does need to be drawn somewhere, such as with Serbo-Croatian, which is politically three different languages. Rysten 20:06, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian is a bit more complicated. Politically, it used to be considered a single language, and there are probably a fair number of people today who still consider it as such. Arabic has always been considered to be a single language. john k 02:11, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, wasn't disagreeing with you. Serbo-Croatian is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Rysten 11:00, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Missed the Chinese, regardless other languages should be broken up more. I guess the only other main worry is the estimates, The estimate for English seems deadly low.--DigitalA 02:49, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

I dont know about DigitalA,but im a spanish speaking person and i do not understand italian at all,its a big mistake for you to called them allmost dialects.Theyre from from a family of languages like english and german are.--Andres rojas22 05:45, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

english is partly derived from latin languages and partly from germanic langueges and not the other way around. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.9.236.28 (talk) 22:39, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

I would say that the numbers listed for Mandarin are somewhat false. It says that it's listing the number of native speakers, but in China, how many people actually speak Mandarin as their first language, as the definition of native is "by birth", or in this case, firstly or primarily. Although they may learn Mandarin later on in their life, this doesn't mean that Mandarin was their first language. I believe that a right estimate would be maybe 500-650 million because mostly Northern China people, Taiwanese, Singaporean, and other overseas Chinese seem to actually speak Mandarin as their first language. Also, a more reasonable estimate for the number of people who speak Mandarin as their second language is maybe 500-700 million, as the rest of the population in China learns Mandarin as a second language and foreigners also learn Mandarin, adding to this sum. -Wannabefob 16:41, 28 September 2009 (GMT -8)

Dutch

To the best of my knowledge, Dutch is not spoken on the Island of Sint Maarten, or at least it is rare. But on the Island of Curacao, I think it is more common. Nightworker (talk) 12:14, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, English is more common on Sint Maarten. I have a question: why aren't the US and Canada in the place of significant communities? ~150.000 speakers in each country. Mallerd (talk) 15:16, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Spanish

I think the count for Spanish is a bit misleading. Spanish has many different dialects, and those dialects are very, very different. For example, many of the differences between American and British english exist in pronunciation and idioms, and a few minor spelling differences, but they can surely understand eachother with no problem. That is not always the case with Spanish. Spanish dialects often have more significant differences, including in some cases, different pronouns and conjugations. A person who speaks the Puerto Rican dialect would most likely be completely unable to understand someone who speaks the Argentinian dialect, and vice-versa. I think this should be noted, or to find a reliable source for it somewhere. I would myself, but I am about to go to bed. - MK ( ^talk/_contribs) 10:10, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

While this isn't true for American vs. standard British English, surely one can find dialects within the British Isles that are pretty much incomprehensible to speakers of standard American English. I've never seen Argentinian Spanish listed as its own language anywhere. Also, "completely able to understand" always strikes me as nonsense in cases like this. Native Spanish speakers with only the most minimal training are able to understand spoken Italian fairly well. Given that, I find it hard to believe that an Argentinian and a Puerto Rican would find it impossible to converse. john k 15:44, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Not true at all. I'm mexican and I can perfectly understand any spanish-speaker. The grammar and sintaxis are the same. The ortography is the same... sometimes the way of speaking changes, but the elements that constitute the language do not --189.135.204.243 21:01, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I am from Argentina and I can understand a guy from Puerto Rico... probably I won't be able to understand the SLANG of Puerto Rico... but the language itself will remain understandable to me, and to any native spanish speaker... And I will appreciate that You don't call "AMERICA" to the USA... Because I am as american as a guy native from the USA.... Plus I think a guy from USA will have lots of troubles talking to someone from England, than someone from Argentina talking to someone from Puerto Rico, Mexico, or whatever... And I Agree with John Kennedy... we can easily understand ITALIAN and PORTUGUESE...Chau!

In respose to the above comment I just want to clarify that 1) when someone refers to 'America' it is typically understood that the speaker is refering to the United States of America (USA) so you would not be "American", you would be "South American" and, more specifically, "Argentinian". Refering to oneself as "American" is typically globally understood as meaning that you are from the US although that is debatable. 2) I am from the US and I have a number of friends from the UK. I generally have little trouble understanding them. The differences between American English and British English are usually trivial (spelling/pronounciation) with different slang as in the case of different regional Spanish dialects. I have no knowledge of the language spoken in the British Isles reference in the first post so I can't offer an informed response. 3) I don't speak Spanish but I do know several friends that are Portuguese and they can carry on a conversation with someone in Spanish just fine (or at least so it seems). Leeor net (talk) 00:38, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm spanish and I must say the first guy is TOTALLY WRONG. The only thing that changes betweenm the spanish spoken in each country is the "intonation", the way you pronounce words, and that's all. It's the SAME LANGUAGE, and OF COURSE (it's obvious I think) we can understand each other. Were you trying to make a joke?? ^^ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.125.57.216 (talk) 12:43, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

The person that wrote the first comment does not speak and does not know Spanish. It is absolutely false. Any Argentinian, can understand and speak without any trouble with a Mexican, or with any one from Nicaragua. It is true that some Spanish speakers in the USA have lost their Spanish, this is very clear in the third generation and what it is call Spanglish really exists. Those are the only ones that may face some dificulties to communicate with the rest, but only little difficulties, the rest none. The people that Speaks fluent Spanish, can understand Portuguese and Italian easily. Who will believe they will not understand each other?

I agree with my fellow Spanish-speakers. In fact, the Spanish language is, among the world communication langauges, one of the most homogeneous and coherent, both in grammar and lexicon. I think that the above mention comments are missleading, and the author would have to justify its arguments with some reliable literature (please, check at: http://cvc.cervantes.es/obref/anuario/anuario_98/moreno/moreno_03.htm) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.167.45.242 (talk) 09:02, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree that spansh doesn't change that much and that all spanish speakers can fairly understand each other. However, I disagree with those that said that a spanish speaking person can understand Italian and Portuguese easily, because sorry that is not the case. If that was true, then all of those who speak Spanish will be able to understand French also, because words in French are very similar to words in Italian. I think that they need to calrify that there are words among this lanaguages that any Spanish speaker may be able to understand, but unless they took some courses or something to learn more Italian, or Portuguese, then neither Argentinans, nor Mexicans, not Puerto Ricans, nor any other Spanish speaker will understand each other easily. I am a fluent Spanish speaking person and cannot understand portuguese and some of the Italian either, so I don't think that I would be able to understand, much less to communicate to someone who is fluent Italian speaker and viceversa. Karla99.17.223.71 (talk) 11:03, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Well maybe you are not a native speaker of Spanish, my friend, and if you are, maybe you just have a mediocre education. Anyway, I am a fluent speaker of six languages, yet there is a huge difference between being a fluent speaker and a native speaker. Any Spanish native speaker with a High School education can read texts in Portuguese easily, understanding spoken Portuguese is more difficult without training. They would also understand fairly well written Italian, and also spoken Italian, since the sounds are very similar. French is more different and impossible to understand without proper training in the spoken form. It may be understood only a little reading it, without training. Besides, I live in the Portuguese border of Spain and communication is perfect between Spaniards and the Portuguese. It is true though that the Portuguese understand very well spoken Spanish while it is harder the other way around. Even in the case of those with little or no education in foreign languages and with some innate difficulty (a bit dumb for languages in other words)it would take just about a week in either Portugal or Italy to communicate fairly well.I might even dare to say that for people with a bit of education and good will, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian make together a new category, which means, they are different languages but easily comprehensible in the proper context. Upps.

I completely disagree as well. I am a speaker of Spanish as a second language and I can readily understand people from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and even Central America. What's more, I can speak rather easily with Brazilians and Portuguese. Obviously, if I am able to do this as a non-native speaker, the languages must be rather similar.Japxican (talk) 19:18, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

By now, everyone could figure out that the first comment is completely WRONG. Obviously that person is not a native speaker or a non-speaker of Spanish. Latin American countries don't have different dialects. Spanish is the standard language, and an Argentinian will have no difficulty undestanding a Puerto Rican or a Salvadoran. So much attention is paid to the standardization that Latin American countries and Spain meet every year to maintain that standard. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.213.103.236 (talk) 21:40, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

I also agree that the first comment is wrong. I'm a non-native speaker of spanish and while the accents and vocab differences can present a challenge I can communicate with any Spanish speaking person in the world. As the comment has been so completely debunked I think we should delete or at least edit the discussion to a minimum. This debate is settled and is taking up a lot of space.

Tibetan

The Tibetan Language is listed twice? Iancarter (talk) 12:47, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Chinese

That there are different dialects within Mandarin is indisputable, but I think that people are failing to realize that these "dialects" are really closer to separate languages. One of the most defining attributes of a language is that it is mutually intelligible to speakers but unintelligible anyone else. From my own experience and those of my Chinese colleagues, I think that based on this definition Mandarin should be broken up into several languages. Just as English, Spanish, and French speakers might be able to discern select words and phrases from the other two languages without knowing them, so might people who have grown up in Shanghai, Xian, and Beijing be able to understand bits and pieces of what people from the other two cities are saying, but in both cases complete comprehension is not possible. Therefore, just as English, Spanish, and French are considered separate languages, so should the various "dialects" of Mandarin. This might have been touched on before, but I think it deserves additional consideration. -- Mike

I think you are mixing the terms "Chinese" and "Mandarin" here. Chinese is indeed more like a macrolanguage composed of several languages; you have Mandarin, Wu, Minnan, Minbei, Hakka, Gan and some more, which are usually regarded as seperate languages by linguists. Mandarin or Putonghua is by nearly everyone considered a language with dialects, not as a macrolanguage. Your comparison with French, Italian and Spanish (English doesn't fit in, here) works for the Chinese macrolanguage, but not for Mandarin. A speaker of the Beijing dialect of Mandarin doesn't have much problems in understanding a Mandarin speaker from Yunnan or Taiwan. The differences there are comparatively small, so that from the criterium of mutual intellegibility Mandarin is one single language. — N-true 10:52, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

There is a special relationship among Chinese languages that does not exist among Romance languages or Germatic languages. To understand this one must differentiate between spoken languages and written languages. Mandarin and Cantonese are clearly two different spoken languages; however they are the same written language, specifically they are both Chinese. That is because their "script" is based on ideograms, not phonetics. Although a Mandarin speaker can not understand the spoken words of a Cantonese speaker, they can understand each other's written word, (they can write letters to each other; they both understand each other's newspapers). The written Chinese symbol for a given word is the same whether written by a Mandarin speaker or a Cantonese speaker, yet the spoken word in Mandarin is different from the spoken word in Cantonese. On the other hand, Romance languages also all use the same “script” (abc), but because their scripts are based on phonetics, (sounds combined to make spoken words), Spanish, Italian, English and German are all different spoken languages and different written languages. Hplwas (talk) 18:56, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

The number given for native speakers of Mandarin seems unreasonably high. As recently as March 2007, the Chinese government claimed, as reported by Xinhua (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm), that only somewhat more than half of the population is even a competent oral user of Mandarin, and yet the number given for native speakers accounts for more than three quarters of the Chinese population. Even allowing for a high number of native speakers outside of China, it seems extremely difficult to believe that you could add more than 200 million, the figure necessary even if everyone counted as 'proficient' is labeled also as a native speaker, which is itself indefensible. - Manicsleeper 7:39, 11 June 2007

There is a little confusion here. In the report you posted above, Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) in China is literally more standard than just Mandarin in the English term. In China, Putonghua (Standard Mandarin) means the exact pronunciation taught at school (written is always the same for all Han Chinese languages), so, in that news report, people from rural area who speak a dialect very close to Mandarin is always not counted as Putonghua speaker, but they might be considered as Mandarin speaker in English if their so called dialects are very close to Mandarin, their dialects would even be considered as just Mandarin with some local accent. The whole population from North China and Northeastern China (about 5-600 million people) all speak Mandarin with their local accents, but in China these would be considered more than 15 kinds of dialects. Although the difference is so small that a person from Xi'an and a person from Harbin (2500 km away) can understand each other even if they met for the first time and both speak the language they speak at home. The level of difference in their language is more like the level of difference of British English and American English. In English, both people would be considered speaking the same language (Mandarin), in China, they would be considered speaking two dialects, NOT Putonghua (Standard Mandarin). The 5-600 million Chinese from Northern China plus Mandarin speakers from Southern China, the number on the ranking list is about right. Chadsnook (talk) 14:37, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Chadsnook. I found the piece of news in original language (simplified Chinese): 超过半数中国人能用普通话与人交谈. Notice that in the headline, zh:普通话(=Standard Mandarin) is used instead of zh:官话(=Mandarin Chinese). The headline in the English version is not a precise translation. --Quest for Truth (talk) 15:35, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

One must distinguish the difference between "accent" and "dialect" in order to define the actual number of Chinese speakers. An accent, like the British and American, is understood by the speakers of the common language - English. A dialect, however, like Spanish and Catalan, is not understandable. Mandarin or also called Putonghua is the main and official dialect among all other Chinese dialects (such as Cantonese). When talking about Mandarin speakers, they are speaking the same commonly understandable language. This is similar to the English speakers. Americans, Australians, British, Canadians, New Zealanders, Singaporeans, South Africans also speak the common language of English, but have different local or regional accents. So, they understand each other without difficulties. As for Mandarin, this is also the same case. Mandarin speakers, who are from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Taiwan etc, speak the commonly understandable language of Mandarin Chinese, only with different regional accents. They understand each other completely except slangs or local expressions. Nevertheless, Cantonese and other Chinese dialects are considered as seperate dialects. Among speakers of all other Chinese dialects, they are not able to understand each other, except in the written form. Chinese has two forms of writing systems (no grammartical differences) or to better describe - two sets of characters. They are Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters. Without previously learning or training, readers and writers of these two forms are not able to understand each other, except some of the words which are written the same way. Yet, there is formula can be learned to unlock the differences.

Mandarin Speaking: China, Taiwan, Singapore
Cantonese Speaking: Guangdong Province of China, Hong Kong, Macau and most of the Overseas Chinese (old generation)

Simplified Writing: China, Singapore
Traditional Writing: Hong Kong, Macau, Overseas Chinese (old generation)
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Jerjer19 (talk • contribs) 18:41, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

English

I liked the guy who totaled the English speakers from the "List of Countries by English-speakers" - real classy. How long did it sit there uncontested? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.140.42.163 (talk) 19:19, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

The sources are dated from 1984. All this information has been wrong for years. According to the US Census Bureau as of 2005 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population/ancestry_language_spoken_at_home.html

The number of Americans who speak English as a first language is 216,176,111. That is citizens OVER 5 years old. There a potential source of confusion, should you count infants? Regardless the total tally is still old and wrong. According to the Census of Canada 17,572,170 people speak English as a mother tongue. http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/products/highlight/LanguageComposition/Page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo=PR&View=1a&Table=1a&StartRec=1&Sort=2&B1=Counts&B2=Both

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as of 2001, 15,013,965 people spoke English as a first language. http://209.85.215.104/u/AustralianBureauOfStatistics?q=cache:6AQMMpTSW7IJ:www.abs.gov.au/Websitedbs/D3310116.NSF/85255e31005a1918852556c2005508d8/c47ad86d67c1466bca256ce0007e8d6b/%24FILE/ATTH23CO/Exstatic%25202%25202005,%2520Australia.xls+language&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&ie=UTF-8

The information is very easy to find. Every country has a Census Board and the info is all in English. Whoever doctored this page up cut corners, here are some hard facts that are much more accurate. Do with them what you will. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.6.214.177 (talk) 06:26, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

The count for English speakers is absurdly wrong. The population of the UNited States alone is 300 million: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_united_states

The count for English speakers needs a big note that the 309,350,000 number came from 1984, when the population of the United States was between 226,545,805 and 244,664,694 - where 1984 interpolates to 231,075,527. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census,_1980). That way the comparison to the current population of 300+ million will be less tempting. On a related note, the column header that says "2005 estimate" looks like a reference to the publication date (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng), not the date of the number itself. But I assume it is too embarrassing to come out and say "1984 estimate". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.98.145.235 (talk) 03:18, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

IF there is some scientific calculation or classification decision causing the Ethnologue writers to arrive at this apparently bizarrely wrong figure, it needs to be clearly spelled out, because as it stands the number looks instantly wrong and cast doubt over the entire article.

Sailboatd2 14:04, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

My first reaction was the same as you. However, not everyone in the US is a native speaker of English; the 2000 census recorded "just" 215,423,557 people aged 5 or more who only spoke English at home. See Table 1, Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000. -- Avenue 05:24, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but just because the remander does not only speak english at home it does not mean that they are not native speakers. It would be hard to grow up in the US without being a native speaker.00:43, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

No, that's what "native speaker" means - a person who speaks the language at home. A person can only have one native language, traditionally. john k 03:16, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

You're wrong here, John, think about it (or read this article): A native speaker is by definition someone who speaks a certain language since his childhood, when he/she has learned it from his/her childhood. Your native language doesn't suddenly change just because your move to another country and live with your wife who happens to speak this other language. :D — N-true 11:40, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Children who grow up speaking a different language from English at home are not native English-speakers. There probably are not very many people who fit your model. "Language spoken at home" is not a perfect measure of "first language speaker," but it is the closest approximation available. john k 04:24, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Untrue. I speak English as my first language, but my first Language used to be Polish. I've been in the States far to long to speak English as a second language, when I speak in Polish, I speak like a child with an English accent.

Well Mr. Noname, the human brain is able to memorize hundreds of millions of "language information pieces" fully automatically without "learning" - but only within the first years of life, when the child typically still lives at home. If the childhood is followed by a proper education in this language, a very high level of language competence can be acquired, unmatchable by other people that start to learn that (ethnic) language in the age of 10 or above. Though it may be difficult sometimes to draw a precise line between native and not native, in your case it seems obvious that Polish is your native language, even if you haven't developed full Polish competence, and English may now be your primary (= primarily used) language, however it is your second language, eventually with a "near-native level", higher than mine. You can see this for yourself, because a real first language speaker of English would probably not have mixed up "first" with "primary", and "second" with "secondary" as you did. --Allgaeuer 00:13, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

The population of The United States is approx 300 million people. The population of the United Kingdom is approx 61 million. Australia 21 million. Canada 32 million. And in India, English is an official language of their government which means it is taught as such. In most European countries english is an official language, or a required language in their school systems. The notion that only 300 million people world wide are native english speakers is just stupid. Don't become stubborn and refuse to accept facts. I'm not saying that these countries only speak english but I'm saying the vast majorities of these countries speak english as a native language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_speaking_countries This is a list of countries that officially speak English. It's well over 300 million. Please change it. --HomrQT

This is a list of native speakers, not total speakers. There are almost no native English-speakers in India or on the European continent, or in Africa outside South Africa (where there's only a pretty small percentage of native English speakers). A sizeable percentage of the population of Canada has French, or some other language as their native language. The same is true in the UK (Welsh, Urdu, Hindi, etc.) and especially the United States (Spanish, mostly, but other languages too). There's also the very young, who aren't generally counted as having any language, as I understnad it. Are you really saying that most French people speak English as a native tongue? john k 17:48, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

No I'm not saying most french speak english as a native tongue. But I am saying there are a percentae of the people in France who do use english as a native language. And so are there in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc in Europe and throughout the world, just as there are native spanish speaking people in the US, there are native English speaking peoples in every one of those countries, and a very considerable amount. And for there to be only 300 million native speakers of english, then just in the US, UK, AND Australia alone there would have to be less than 80% of all 3 of these locations speaking english as a first language???? That's not even counting every other country in the world that does have english as their official language. --HomrQT 25 July 2007 (UTC)

What in the world are you talking about with these supposed native English-speakers in Germany and France? Obviously there are emigrés, but those are a pretty tiny percentage of the over-all population. Pretty much no actual Germans and French people would speak English as a native language, even if they are fluent in it. I agree that 300 million seems low - given an estimate of about 80% in each of the main English speaking countries save Canada, and about 2/3 in Canada, one would imagine at least 240 million or so for the US, 48 million for the UK, 20 million for Canada and 16 million for Australia, for a total of, what 325 million? That might be conservative, and that's ignoring several million more native speakers in Ireland, New Zealand, the anglophone West Indies, and South Africa. One would have to imagine there's about 350 million or so native English speakers. But there's very few in India and continental Europe. john k 18:15, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The 309 million figure is wrong. If you are really conservative in your estimations you get 230m in the US, 50m in the UK, 15m in Canada, 15m in Australia which is already a million over. Adding in all the other English speaking populations around the world it is unlikely that English is the native language of less than 330million people.rsloch 12:45, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

309 million native English speakers should cover pretty much North America... Now what about the rest of the world? 350 million sounds like a more reasonable number. that's like a 17% increase than what is posted. I wasn't suggesting an additional 150 million speakers or anything like that. But I thought between 350, 380 would accomidate much better for native english speakers of the world. And you seem so shocked about people in Germany and France speaking english as a native language in their home. Yet you don't seem surprised that spanish speaking people in the US would natively speak spanish in their homes, yet speak fluent english outside of their homes... John I have family in Europe. I've been to Europe. It's not as crazy as you're making it sound. Because of the United States military presence in these countries (military bases), and our movies , television, music, radio, and our influence through the internet, generations of peoples in Europe and alot of the world are alot more fluent in english than you think, and a lot more in numbers speak it in their homes than you think. --HomrQT 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Learn to spell before commenting HomrQT —Preceding unsigned comment added by 145.229.156.40 (talk) 14:43, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I've lived in Paris. There's obviously anglophones in these European countries, especially in the bigger cities. But they're a tiny percentage of the overall population (even if they're a large percentage of the population of Parisian pubs). And I defy you to present any evidence that actual native-born continental Europeans speak English in the home. You can't just assert such a thing. It's simply not true. Many Europeans are fluent in English. But it's simply not their native language. The situation with Spanish-speakers in the United States is not the same at all - there are large immigrant communities in the United States who speak Spanish as their first language. Especially for second generation immigrants, they are also usually fluent in English, but Spanish is their native language. The third generation generally speaks Spanish only as a second language, if that (depending on where they live - assimilation is slower in more Hispanic areas, obviously). There is no large English or Canadian or American immigrant population in continental Europe. What Anglophones there are are basically expats, and I would imagine that the vast majority only live on the continent for a few years, at most. This is not a similar situation at all. William Waddington may have been a Frenchman who was a native English-speaker, but there really aren't very many people like that, and if you want to demonstrate that there are, you need more than anecdotal evidence. john k 22:06, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I'd have to agree that number is absurdly low. While I accept that many people living in the United States are English-as-a-first-language speakers, 300million is an incredibly low figure. Part of it seems to be the absurdly out of date figures used in the Ethnolouge report; here - The World figure is 8 years old, and that is one of the better ones. The U.K population figure is from 1984! American Samoa, for example, uses the 1970 census figures! Canada is 1998. This is a bigger problem than for just English speakers. P.S - "Second-language speakers in India: 11,021,610 (1961 census)." Oh come on! Iorek85 01:00, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

The person(s) that are editing the english speaking numbers are too stubborn to accept that their numbers are low. This web page is for nothing if they have idiots unwilling to accept that they have the wrong information. Anyone that looks at this number immediately recognizes it being too low. 03:00, 01 October 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 135.214.154.104 (talk)

As has already been pointed out, the Ethologue figures are horrendously unreliable; one only has to look at | the wikipedia article on the subject, to see the variety of years from which their data has been obtained. Given this, why is their information given in the article's table, and worse, why is this the data by which the languages are ranked, as according to the table's right hand column?

Matisia (talk) 16:41, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

I understand that the number only includes native speakers but where did the Spanish number come from? Many people in Latin America speak native indian languages and access to education is not on par with the US. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ItemSeven (talk • contribs) 13:41, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

If only English native speakers are listed, (leaving out fluent speakers), why is Esperanto in the list? —Preceding unsigned comment added by ItemSeven (talk • 13:41, 16 June 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.118.15.34 (talk)

English isn't really much to do with Esperanto, but the reason Esperanto is listed is because there are actually people who have decided to learn it. Thanks for pointing it though since Esperanto has a lot fewer native speakers than that. Munci (talk) 10:57, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Arabic

What happened to arabic? Even if there are dialects, it's still a real language. ZeroFive1 02:50, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Arabic was taken out because a lot of these "dialects" aren't even vaguely mutually intelligible. Putting them all together could thus create this erroneous impression to the less informed viewer. This is why all the other Chinese languages besides Mandarin were taken out in the top row. BTW, does anyone know if the different variants of Hindi are mutually intelligible?Pedrassi

Sorry, I've now noticed Pedrassi that you have been discussing it. But it looks like an edit war is evolving. In defining a language, what speakers feel themselves to be speaking seems to have a stronger influence that mutual intelligibility (which works in dialect chains anyway: I think everyone in the Arab world can understand their neigbours in the nearest town or village just fine), so my vote for this list is to keep Arabic as a language. But I won't revert as there hasn't been a full discussion. You're right, Pedrassi, about consistency, and as you suggest, Hindi does have the same issues, which is why ethnologue gives it 180m. But somewhere between 200-300m people feel themsleves to be speakers of Arabic, whether they can understand everyone else who thinks the same or not. I don't know about Chinese: do people first consider themeslves of Mandarin/Cantonese or Chinese: my hunch is gernally the former, but that's just a hunch from talking to a few Chinese people, nothing scientific. Drmaik 05:45, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

But Drmaik, a language's purpose is to communicate effectively and without mutual intelligibility that cannot happen. People may feel they speak Arabic, but if an Egyptian can't talk to a Saudi in his mother tongue then this talk of a "common language" is little more than an illusion. And if we consider otherwise on this list, this article risks bordering on irrelevance, by putting side by side unified languages with ununified ones, which is unfair.That's what I think anyhow.Pedrassi

That is not right. Arabs understand each other even if they speak in their own dialects.--AraLink 02:38, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Is there a reason why arabic isnt on the list anymore? just something I noticed. --The Fear 01:18, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Someone must have vandalised the page and removed it; this is one of the most highly vandalised pages on Wikipedia. I seem to recall it being around fifth or so. I don't have the time right now to sift through old edits looking for where Arabic was taken out, but someone should. —Cuiviénen 01:34, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Probably it is an act of vandalism again. I've added it back. Can we request a simi-protection to a page? --AraLink 01:54, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I moved the two discussions on Arabic together. Let's keep on chatting, but it seems there's more of an agreement to have Arabic as a united language. Drmaik 05:21, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, Aralink, we SHOULD request a "semi-protection" on this page to stop your constant editing. At least I've explained my actions on this page, something you have persistently failed to do. I can only conclude then that you don't actually have an argument for putting Arabic on the list, and that you are doing it on the grounds of Nationalism, etc. We really need an admin here to intervene. After some research, some "variants" of Hindi are not mutually intelligible (the Indian government is even planning on making some of these "variants" different, recognised languages) so I'm going to change that as well.Pedrassi

I agree with Drmaik that Arabic should appear as a single language in this list. Kyle Cronan 21:03, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Single language or not, Arabic should appear on the list somewhere. If we insist on seperating out dialects,some dialets will still be on the list. I don't know, but I've heard that most of North African Arabic is mutally inelligible, which would certainly put it high on the list. If even half of Egyptians can understand eachother, Egyptian Arabic wMoreover (by the way I made the previous comment too, just not when I was signed in), I think I have a solution that could fix a lot of these dialect problems: put both on. If you look at a CIA factbook ranking of, say, population, it will go something like China, EU, US, etc...but include European countries seperately as well. Because the point of this page is not to award prizes to widely spoken languages. The goal of this page is to impart information. That some form of Arabic is spoken by the fifth largest number of people is interesting and important information, as is the breakdown by dialect. For now, not having Arabic at all makes this page ill still be on the list.

worse that unreliable: it reduces it to irrelevancy.

Feel free to add Egyptian Arabic to the list. In fact, it was on a while back (thanks to Drmaik I believe) but was taken out (by Aralink I presume). Aralink continues to revert without explanation so I suggest blocking him indefinitely until he begins to participate in a more contributive manner.Pedrassi 11:13, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't have the wikipedia skills change the table, so if someone else could do that...I did however find a useful site [1], Egptian should be at 46 million, and many other dialects will be on the list.

Ok Pederassi, take out Arabic if you want, but please put at least some dialects in to replace it. ~Matveiko

I've added Egyptian Arabic to the list. Let's hope Aralink and other vandals don't come back lurking again... Pedrassi 10:40, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I thought this list was meant to be based on political definitions of languages, not linguistic ones. Removing Arabic and splitting it seems bad to me. john k 16:46, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

With Arabic defined as one language again, which may be inevitable given the difficulty of seperating out dialects, I added a note that this includes all dialects not necesarily mutually intelligible. That should clear up any false impressions that readers might get if they assume (like I used to) that Arabic is one uniform language.

It seems to me that there ought to be a decision made that is at least consistent. I understand the challenge in determining whether or not Arabic is unified enough to be considered a single language, but if we're operating on that assumption, why is it only at #4? Given the Encarta estimate, it seems like it would make sense to place it higher. As it stands, it doesn't look right. Mikehoffman 20:36, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I believe it would be appropriate to treat each macrolanguage as a single group. Dividing these languages into their smaller dialects/languages can typically cause a lot of problems, and at least we have an established ISO list of metalanguages to conform to, rather than a seperate concensus opinion of our end that such a division/conglomeration is appropriate/inappropriate. I think it shows up as #4, because we have no Ethnologue value reporting number of speakers. As such, we're taking a best guess (CIA factbook + SIL + other aggregate date). I suppose it may be helpful to mention in the article that these are at best estimates, and that the ranking by number of speakers is potentially out-of-date, invalid, or just plain wrong. (Of course, this is the standard Wikipedia disclaimer) --Puellanivis 20:54, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

But the Ethnologue does give a figure for speakers of all varieties. I even provided a web reference when I put it in, and someone took it out. Here we go again. Drmaik 05:54, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

My apologizes then. Hopefully this won't get edited out then. --Puellanivis 06:25, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

The list mentions that all the Arabic dialects are included, but it does not say the same thing for other languages (such as German where there are many dialects). Why mentioning dialects only for Arabic?. Another thing, the Modern Standard Arabic is the only official language in use in most Arab countries (in the media, education, government...). The article is starting to be about politics not linguistics. One last thing, there are many wiki users who always try to give the issue of Arabic dialects more than its real size. Most satellite TV channels for example, target all the Arab countries (Pan-Arab) and not only their country of origin, here in the Arab World, it is not a big issue because we understand each other. Bestofmed 18:20, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

It mentions all dialects because the main source, the Ethnologue, classifies Arabic as a macrolanguage, and lists the dialects seperately as different varieties. We thought it best however to include all these together in this list, which explains the comment. Drmaik 10:55, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion guys, just Arabic should be included without adding dialects. I'm Syrian myself and I can understand any Saudi, Egyptian, Lebanese, Algerian ..etc even if he/she is speaking with the dialect because we use the same words. It is just the way in English. In USA itself there are many dialect, and everybody knows that the word tomato can be said in two different ways. Also, it's very easy to distinguish between an American, British, or Australian dialects; however, they are all included under English language because they can understand each other. Same in Arabic. Moreover, Arabic dialects are not written. Every Arabic speaker writes in Arabic language, so all 300,000 people write the same language. Fianlly, in the Arabic mass media, the formal Arabic is spoken. To sum things up, I believe that we should put just Arabic without adding dialects because dialects haven't any effect on our ability to understand each other, in addition of the fact that in formal speaking, the formal Arabic is used in all 22 Arab countries. qawmi 01:41 AM (GMT -8), 12 March 2007

Arabic is a macrolanguage (as said by ISO and not by Ethnologue. Correct me if I am wrong), not because it is not the same across multiple regions, but because there are some differences in locals (such as hour/date format, adapted months name, some minor terms); I mean this classification is for political/colonial past/geographical reasons and not linguistic (I am not saying that all Arabs speak one dialect). And remember my question was: why only dialects/varieties are mentioned only for Arabic; there are German varieties (even in Switzerland itself, they can not understand each other across german cantons), there are Portuguese varieties (even different in writing system). Why only Arabic (which at least has the same writing system with an agreed unified form; Arabic Wikipedia is a great example)??. I agree with qawmi, I am a Tunisian, and I can understand a Syrian easily as many other Tunisians (more than that, I am a fan of Syrian TV series; you see what I mean). Before closing Drmaik, if you want I can help you in your work on Tunisian Arabic. BestofMed 02:11, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Hey, "There are Portuguese varieties (even different in writing system)", just prove it!!! That is not true, defend your ideology concerning arabic, but do not say what you does not know!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.157.35.20 (talk) 15:43, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I am from Kuwait and I do agree with qawmi, although many dialects where derived from Arabic yet non of them considered an official language (non of them is used in newspapers or though as schools...They doesn't have formal grammar for example) or even an official dialect...people in the Arab world can understand each others whether they live in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Tunisia. I think the list should organize languages according to how many countries using Arabic as their official language (maybe mention in the notes that some countries use different dialects such as American, British or Australian English). According to UN website, Arabic unifies more than 200M native speakers radiant guy (talk) 08:20, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Hindi/Khariboli

Okay, people! Does it not bother anyone that "Hindustani" is the second most spoken language in the world, and yet, there is no section for Hindi--the most obvious of the Hindustani family--in Wikipedia? And that text in Hindi is displayed in wikipedia, but not offered as symbols for insertion in editing pages? Raise your voices, Indian sub-continent! Soon, we shall have all the other languages follow suit! Freakonaleash lp (talk) 23:53, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Khariboli is a dialect of Hindi and so are atleast 10 other different dialects of Hindi. And I have modified the page accordingly. I would request you to quote the correct figure for it. I hope your next step won't be splitting american english and British english in two seperate langauges. -apurv1980 15:46, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, a lot of these "dialects" aren't even mutually intelligible. In fact, the Indian government is even considering making some of these "dialects" official separate languages in the near future. Therefore, your comparison with the two main variants of English is completely preposterous. I suggest better research before attempting further edits. Cheers Pedrassi 21:05, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Can you provide one reliable link from GOI that says they are considering to make these dialects as seperate languages. I have lived in those states where these dialects are spoken for 18 years. I speak all of them without knowing which one I am speaking. Then lived in England 5 years and then moved to US for last 4 years. Don't tell me there is no diffrence between british english and american english. Infact english differs widely in the US itself. People from northern states find it little difficult to communicate with those from Bible belt. I am reverting again your so called facts unless you provide link to "consideration of indian government". apurv1980 18:22, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

English differs even more widely within Britain than it does between Britain and America, I think. At any rate, I don't think mutual intelligibility can ever be the basis for distinction here, due to the problems of dialect continuum. Political identity, I think, is more important. So Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and so forth probably ought to count as single languages despite their mutual incomprehensibility. I'm willing to ignore this for Chinese, where the various dialects/variant forms are well-defined and well-known. I'm less willing to do this for Arabic and Hindi, where the various forms are much less well-defined (and, in the latter case, where the relationship of these forms to one another seems to be fairly unclear). john k 21:28, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

This type of linguistic classification should be done by linguists and NOT by wikipedians. If the languages classified under Hindi are marked by linguists as distinct ones, mention that. If not, do that. But we should not depend on original research or depend on people's experiences. --Ragib 21:31, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

What is a "language" cannot be defined by a linguist, because that is not what linguistics does. There is a dialect continuum, and no clear and agreed upon way to decide what languages are. I agree that languages should not be determined by "wikipedians." They should be determined by (more or less official) political definitions, because the difference between a language and a dialect is entirely political. Linguists don't consider Hindi to be distinct languages. They view there to be a wide variety of different linguistic forms in northern India. To call all these forms "dialects of Hindi" is a political decision of the Indian government. Other people view these as separate languages, and linguists may agree with them that they are not all mutually intelligible. But linguists have no role in deciding whether they are dialects or separate languages, because that's not what linguists do. john k 02:36, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, i do not see any point in your argument. If neither GOI does recognizes them as seperate languages nor any major group of linguists then why put it that way on wikipedia. All north Indians (more than 350 million) understand each other perfectly irrespective of dialect. And regarding POLTICAL standpoint, there are no polical/literary movements to recognize them as seperate languages. And in my personal experience difference between Boston english Vs South American English are more profound than in between different dialects of Hindi. But still if you could provide some reliable references from GOI or majority of linguists that they are different languages then we can put it that way on wikipedia. -apurv1980 03:57, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Er, my argument is that you are asking linguists to do something that linguists don't do. Whether something is a language or not is a political and not a linguistic designation. The government of India considers them dialects of Hindi. Other people, basing their arguments on the fact that linguists note that these dialects are often not mutually comprehensible, consider them separate languages. I will tell you that virtually any linguist will say that the dialects of Hindi are more distinct from one another than different variants of American English, or, for that matter, than any two variants of standard English, period. Whether this makes them separate languages is, again, a political and not a linguistic distinction, but let's not exaggerate. john k 04:11, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Ancient Hindi

Someone has added numbers for "Ancient Hindi". This is nonsense. There is no such thing as "Ancient Hindi". One certainly can write about "Old Hindi" but that's not the same thing. The author of this edit had created a term and then pulled numbers out of the air. Both should be removed. Interlingua 05:16, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Someone needs to change these figures. Since when did Hindi have around 400 million speakers. In India alone there are over 1 billion speakers and if this table is going to show all Chinese dialects under Mandarin then they should do they same for Indian dialects and put them under Hindi.

Sanskrit and Latin

Regarding the so-called (and non-existent) "Ancient Hindi", one is drawn to wonder why Sanskrit is mentioned in this list of native speakers. According to this article there are 49,736 native speakers, but according to the Indian Census there are 14,135 and according to the List of Indian Languages there are 6,106. Are there really any Indians alive today who who have Sanskrit as a genuine mother tongue? Even in the exalted village of Mathoor? Times of India says that a "majority" of Mathoor's population of some 5,000 use it as a vernacular, but a mother tongue? I don't doubt that thousands speak it fluently as a learned, cultural language, but the same could be said for Latin. Thousands today (and in recent generations, millions) speak Latin fluently, but I doubt that it is the mother tongue of anyone, even in the Vatican, where it is the official language. Or perhaps on this basis, Latin should be included? And what about Pali? Is scholarly competence, along with ritual chanting by those who may not even understand what they are actually saying, enough to justify a presence here? Alvahir (talk) 13:40, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Hebrew - Take your political battle away from Wikipedia, please

It looks like for Hebrew it lists West Bank as a country. Why? It's not a country yet and it's a part of Israel. Once Palestine becomes a country, great I'll be the first to add it myself but until it happens, it should not be there. I'll remove if no argument to keep it will be presented.

Not all of the West Bank belongs to Israel. Some parts belong to the Palestinians and other parts belong to Israel. The West Bank is worth mentioning. It should remain as is. Jerse 22:35, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

But currently, there's no such a country as Palestine, sorry. It's a non existent country. It's just an autonomy but currently all the West Bank territory is under the Israeli law. I'm only willing to rid Wikipedia of Political battles. I'm a left winged Israeli and fully support the creation of the Palestinian state. However, since such country does not yet exist, its future territories should not be mentioned separately.

It's still worth mentioning. In the same sentence it states the United States and California and New York. Same concept. If you want put it in parentheses, go ahead, but other than that leave it be.Jerse 00:41, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

None of the "significant communities in..." lists countries. It lists the West Bank, USA and then specifies that directly with New York, and California, and Gibralter. Gibralter is claimed by both Spain and England, is not a country, and by the same logic excluding "West Bank" would exclude "Gibralter", and we would have: "significant communities in USA." As such, West Bank should stand, as the list is not intended to recognize nationality in any way shape or form, as exampled by the other examples. --Puellanivis 01:25, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

The West Bank is not part of Israel. The State of Israel does not consider the West Bank to be part of Israel, with the exception of East Jerusalem. It is a territory over which no state is recognized to be sovereign, under belligerent occupation by the Israelis. It should stay as it is. I will say that Gibraltar, while not a sovereign state, is a well-recognized dependent territory, and that while the Spanish feel they have a moral right to it, they signed away their legal rights to it in repeated treaties, most notably the Treaty of Utrecht, and as such, cannot claim it as de jure Spanish territory. john k 02:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Is the "west bank" a physical location and an accurate area to describe as a location of significant population of Hebrew speakers? The inclusion of the "West Bank" specifically removes it from Isreal. As long as the "west bank" is a valid geographic region with a significant population of Hebrew speakers, it should remain here. --Puellanivis 02:19, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Ok. I stand corrected. It should be included because now I see it lists different geographical locations. However, the fact remains: West Bank is fully administrated by Israel: "The West Bank (Hebrew: הגדה המערבית‎, Hagadah Hamaaravit, Arabic: الضفة الغربية‎, aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä), also known as Judea and Samaria, is a landlocked Israeli administered territory on the west bank of the Jordan River in the Middle East. It was occupied by Israel after the conclusion of the Six-Day War of (1967)" No flames here, really. But just quoted the West Bank article.

It is administered by Israel, but it is not part of Israel, by anyone's reckoning. john k 18:00, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Welsh

What about Welsh? That's not mentioned at all- ut has many native speakers.

ASL is also not covered. Unfortunately, many languages are not covered. These are really only the particular languages that are either over a significant number of speakers. If you do have information about Welsh, you can maybe even find the Ethnologue article for it, and add it yourself.  :) --Puellanivis 21:03, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Russian

I used my internet browser's search function to find "Russian" within this article and was unsuccessful. How could it have been entirely overlooked or did I just miss something? Muaddib 23:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

You certainly missed it. Why don't you look into section 1 manually. If your browser can't find it, then perhaps it's broken? --Ragib 23:59, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I guess combing through such a long article I'm bound to have overlooked it. So much for relying on IE's search function! Thanks for the help. Muaddib 16:42, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Bulgarian

6.6 million in Bulgaria (2005) and ~1 million abroad = 7.5 million native?? There are 7.5 million people in bulgaria and they all speak bulgarian (turkish isn't oficial lenguage in Bulgaria!). They are also about 1 million abroad so there are 8.5-9 million total speakers.

So are you saying that because Turkish is not an official language, all Turkish people in Bulgaria speak Bulgarian as their native/first language? That is a rather novel definition of "native language." john k 07:19, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

He/She is saying that the number of total number of people speaking in Bulgarian in Bulgaria is higher by 1 million. Although the definition of what "Turkish" is, might be disputed (Is muslim=Turkish? e.g.), almost all of them know Bulgarian as a second language the least, and for a significant part of them Bulgarian is the native language. The remark that "turkish isn't oficial lenguage in Bulgaria!" is a bit irrelevant (and has spelling errors), but what I think he/she hints is that although there is about a million citizens of Bulgaria defining themselves as Turkish, they are not like "Turkish immigrants" or something like that and are born for the most part in Bulgaria. Most are bilingual even before going to school (where Bulgarian is used to teach and other languages are second languages; "mother-tongue" classes are available though). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 138.16.11.213 (talk) 07:03, 27 April 2007 (UTC).

Uyghur

The official number of Uyghur speakers is appr. 8.5 million in xinjiang only, but there is also a significant number in former soviet union. The unofficial figures put the number of over 20 million speakers world wide! It is because of present situation in xinjiang(East Turkestan/Uyghurstan)where most of the Uighur people don't get passports due to the limited child policy, and the nationality change in former soviet union (central asian states) due to chinese pressure on central asian states to crack down on Uighurs.

Portuguese

The number of native speakers in Ethnologue and Encarta is shockingly wrong. It quotes that the number of native speakers is 177million. Taking into consideration that the sum of the total population of Brazil(188million) and Portugal(11million), which have 100% speakers, is around 200 million it is clearly evident that the two sources are immensely innaccurate. And that's just two of the countries that speak portuguese leaving out countries such as Mozambique and Angola. I strongly believe that Encarta and Ethnologue should be avoided for ranking. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.1.72.245 User: WhiteMagick 12:16, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Such an incorrectness is typical of Ethnologue. The Portuguese language article speaks of 210 million native speakers, this seems much more likely to me. — N-true 13:41, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

wrong sure, but shockingly wrong? Have you looked at the ethnologue entry for English? It's almost the same as the population of the United states. Somehow the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, Jamaican, Guyanese, native english speaking populations combined with the native english speaking populations in countries with huge rates of english language fluency such as India manages to amount to only a paltry 22 million. I'll save "Shockingly wrong" for their data on the english language and call their Portuguese data merely "grossly wrong" ;) If you object that the US has many non english speaking people, there are in fact people in both Portugal and Brazil who are non Portuguese speakers as well.

in any case ethnologue may do some valuable work but general language demographic data doesn't seem to be part of that. AS far as I can tell nobody likes their numbers for *any* of the languages and they always undercountZebulin 19:43, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

the count for english speakers is just absurd but counting the native speakers in countries such as India is very hard. There may be e lot of fluent speakers of the english language but they are still second language speakers as the people there have different local mother languages. but this is not the topic of discussion for this subsection! let's talk about the portuguese speakers. i strongly suggest that galician speakers should also be included because even the EU parliament uses spoken portuguese rather than galician; or atleast point out that galician is closely related to portuguese. User:WhiteMagick

100% of the populations in Portugal and Brazil do not speak Portuguese. But it's got to be pretty close (95%?) My understanding is that Mozambique and Angola do not have that many people who speak Portuguese as their mother tongue, although our article on languages in Angola claims otherwise. It would nonetheless appear that there is something of an undercount for Portuguese. john k 00:08, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

I was in Angola (Luanda) a couple of years ago and was quite surprised to hear someone say it wouldn't even cross their minds to use the local languages, not even in a village, as there are enough different languages so that people would be unable to understand each other. Ok, it's a traveller's story if you want. --Xyzt1234 (talk) 22:30, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I begin to suspect that ethnologue systematically undercounts every language. Perhaps they are simply using a lot of outdated data? Since efforts to find their sources have been unencouraging I'd say this portuguese undercount is just one more reason to find another primary source for the numbers used to group the languages in our list.Zebulin 01:04, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

They're definitely using a lot of outdated data. The key to the Portugal undercount would appear to be the very swift population growth in Brazil. Ethnologue gives 163 million Portuguese speakers in Brazil, based on numbers from 1998. In the 2000 census, Brazil had a population of 169 million. But, apparently, the current estimate has Brazil's population increasing to 188 million. So the undercount would seem to entirely arise out of the growth in Brazil's population in the last few years. Looking at English, the numbers for the UK are from 1984 (!!), although they appear to be only slightly smaller than you would expect (55 million). But the numbers for the United States (210 million in 1984, again) are particularly out of date. If we used more recent US numbers, we'd apparently go up to about 250 million native English speakers in the US, which pushes the overall English speaker figures to 360 million. This seems to be the basic issue - systemic undercounting based on old statistics. john k 01:49, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes the numbers for all countries by Ethnologue are seriously outdated, which leads to the argument of why do we use Ethnologue's rankings if they are so inaccurate?User:WhiteMagick

Because it's the only source that lists number of users for such a large number of languages. I'd love to be able t o find a better source, though. john k 16:16, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Surely when using a tiered ranking we can use ethnologue for the languages with fewer speakers which presumably we have fewer sources for and use some more up to date reference for the largest languages (100 million or more) which surely have many more up to date sources available.Zebulin 18:56, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I would concur. I suggested as much elsewhere. john k 22:55, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

The Portuguese native speakers number is very wrong (but not as wrong as the English overall speakers which is huge here and shouldn't).

Join the native speakers from Portuguese Oficial Language countries, and you'll see. If Brasil+Portugal+Angola+Mozambique alone have at least 240 million inhabitants (all native speakers), add to them other Portuguese native speaker countries like "Cabo Verde", "Guiné-Bissau", "Macau" (on China), "São Tomé e Príncipe", East Timor, etc. So if only 4 of these countries sum 240M, how can a value of 170M be valid? Without counting other countries. May reach 270 or more native speakers.

And don't forget the huge Portuguese speaker emigrants which are millions, present in USA, Canada, Bermudas, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland (you hear Portuguese in the streets of every Swiss city), etc. It was also an Official language for India, and other places like the Maldives, etc, in the past.

I also don't understand how the English speakers could be so inflationated and Spanish speakers (not native) counting only 417M if Ethnologue says 438M native, and as a second language on USA alone it would have more 300M? English language is counted as a second language to give those impressive 1,500M but Spanish would be cut off? Spanish native+2nd official, if it would be USA only to be added, would be more than 700M alone (understandable as USA was already a Spanish Empire territory in the past on the Iberian Empire, Filipine's Dinasty. If you sum Portuguese and Spanish native and non-official speakers, you'ld reach near 1 billion speakers (sum the native speakers countries and second language).

There are millions of Portuguese speakers in USA, maybe 2, without counting with all the Portuguese descendents there because those don't speak Portuguese anymore.

And there is something called "Creole Language", for those that have spoken about strange languages in Africa. They'll understand your Portuguese, but usually have sometimes their Creoule Languages which may be difficult to understand for non-Portuguese Speakers, but it's derivated from a mixture of Languages. Anyway telling that in Portugal+Brasil only 95% speak Portuguese is wrong. I can assure (as I'm living in Portugal and know very well Brazil) that anywone speaks Portuguese in these two countries.

Anyway that number should have 80M-100M more native speakers than it has there. Brasil alone beats that number in 20 millions. Just sum the countries' population and you'll get that right.

User:Crashh 06:16, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

It is simply absurdous!

Brazil alone has more than 200 million inhabitants from whose less than 1 percent don't speak Portuguese as their first and native language - very few isolated Indian ethnicities - and I just cannot imagine somebody who was born and raised inside Portuguese borders without learning Portuguese as native language - There's no such thing!

So, just by mentioning Portugal and Brazil, we're talking about more than 210 million human beings and this number must increase from 220 million to 240 million or up when counting Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé e Príncipe, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor and several regions of other countries, such as Galicia, Goa, Macau, Casagrande and parts of Paraguay and Uruguay. Yet the huge Portuguese, Brazilian and PALOP's diaspora communities across the globe.

The age of the Ethnologue publication is no excuse at all, since Brazil and Portugal together had already more than 191 million inhabitants back in 2005.

More than 2 years have passed since the first post on this issue and nothing has been done.

Please do something for the sake of Wikipedia.

User: Popotao 13:33 21 August 2009 UTC

Galician language

According to several dictionaries (see for instance http://www.answers.com/topic/galician) Galician language is "the dialect of Portuguese (sometimes regarded as a dialect of Spanish) spoken in Galicia northwestern Spain". Therefore, it should not be considered as an independent language. Probably the best option would be doing something similar as for German for which they distinguish the Swiss speakers from the speakers of standard German. Similarly, Galician speakers should be in the Portuguese cathegory with a small remark.

I agree completely. Galician though is more closely related to Portuguese rather than Spanish. User:WhiteMagick

The Galician is a language totally independent from the Portuguese, they have the same root linguistics, the Galician-Portuguese, but with the time they have been drifting apart up to being different languages. To see this page of the Wikipedia on the Galician and let's not do ramblings.80.36.174.107 18:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Galician is accepted as Portuguese in the European Union. And with the Reform in 2003 the language was brought orthografically closer to Portuguese because a lot of archaic Galician-Portuguese spelling was reintroduced, spelling which is present in today Portuguese. Spelling differences are of small importance because pronounciation remains the same for a word for both languages. Example: Espelho - Espello. There is a considerable efford and growing support to shed the spanish influence on both the culture and language of the region. User: WhiteMagick

Galician isn't accepted as Portuguese in tue EU. Any galician can communicate with the EU in Galician after the signature of an agreement on the part of the European Ombudsman and the of the Committee of the Regions president with in Spanish ambassador Carlos Sagües Bastarreche. See: Languages of the European Union: Catalan, Galician and Basque where there is a lot of information of numerous sources.80.36.174.107 19:31, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I think WhiteMagick meant the fact at the Galician MPs in the European Parliament, were assigned to the Portuguese translation services.

Whenever you point Galician as an independent languange, you're defying most linguistic conventions. Most specialists agree that it is a dialect of the Portuguese language or the "Galaico-Portuguese diasystem". There's simply no need to point references out, since it's common knowledge and almost every grammar or book on this subject mention it.

More than two years past the first post and nothing was done to change it. Please, do something about it for the sake of Wikipedia.

User: Popotao 12:51, 21 August 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Popotão (talk • contribs)

Indonesian

Hi all: I understand that in general Indonesian is very much a part of the native speakers versus "speakers" issue. But nonetheless even if you only count native speakers of indonesian (see the ethnologue list or the encarta list) you get 17 million native speakers! But, this page has no mention of the Indonesian language at all. Is there something I'm missing here? Seems like a big oversight.Thewhiterabbit11 21:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi, maybe you can read this discussion in Indonesian language article. For a reason that mentioned there (from Kunderemp), it is OK not to put Indonesian in the list. For me, as an Indonesian, it is also ok. Most of us, Indonesian, do not really care about this actually; partly because knowing that international community seems can not accept the fact that Indonesian is used everyday by us, even since we learn to talk (yes, we learn at least two languages at the same time from the very beginning of our life). I am not a linguist, and I do not know the definitions of native language (and their implications on a language position in the list). However, I find myself native Indonesian who was born in Jakarta, learned a local malay creole (Betawi language) when my neighbours played with me, understood/learned Javanese from my mother (she's Javanese), and learned Indonesian from my mother (also) and television (before I went to school). Sounds not native to you? Kembangraps from wiki id: 15:29, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Kunderemp is wrong in his conclusion. In Indonesia, bahasa Indonesia is the official language start from primary 1, and even from Kindergarten or playgroup, and language in television is in Bahasa Indonesia, so toddlers from 2 or 3 years has already spoken bahasa Indonesia. To me they are native speakers. Many youngsters in cities even only speak Bahasa Indonesia nowadays (sometimes with a local intonation and a little bit local dialect vocabulary). Furthermore, Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) is different from Malay. Although it is true that Bahasa Indonesia is from the same root of Malay, it is different in the development, since bahasa Indonesia has been influenced also by Javanese, Sanscrit, Arabic, Chinese peranakan, Dutch and English. It is different not only in speaking but also in writing. It should also be noted that nowadays there is a minor difference in grammar, for example there is a different rule in prefix and suffix. Jahjalim (talk) 02:40, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

French

Hi everyone. I feel the ranking is not quite good: french language is ranked 19th though it has more than 300 million speakers throughout the world, not including people who has some knowledge in french (about 500 to 600 million total). In the article, only natives from France and DOM/TOM are taken into consideration; what about Canada and Africa? The weirdest thing is that it seems that the mistake is made only for this language, as the other ones include speakers outside the mother country. POLO —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.121.160.14 (talk) 5:29, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

The number of French speakers is completely inflated. It is spoken as mother tongue by 75-78 million as mother tongue, and including people with a good knowledge, French is spoken by 128 million people. Finally, Francophonie adds all people that study French around the World, and they consider some 200 million, total speakers.

SO, 500 TO 600 MILLION IS TOTALLY FALSE. There is not a serious webpage where to read these numbers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.168.196.20 (talk) 23:00, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Real problem here: Spanish includes people who speak it as 2nd language while French doesn't. So, two options: either count the 2nd languages for all or for none. Otherwise, what's the point of the page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.6.245.250 (talk) 05:45, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

The number of Francophones is wrong. Francophonie gives us the population that speak French (2005): 136 million of Francophones (77 million of them are mother tongue speakers). Francophonie adds 59 million that are partially Francophone. Total speakers of French, 195 million according to Francophonie. Sorry, but 600 million is a French dream, and there is not an official Francophone page where you can read that. The problem is that Wikipedia can be not a realiable source if you don't erase some numbers. http://20mars.francophonie.org/IMG/pdf/FICHE_03_Nombre_de_francophones.pdf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.168.201.218 (talk) 10:32, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

This article, as far as the french language is concerned, is wrong. If we consider that pretty much everyone in France speaks french, and pretty much everyone in Quebec speaks french, then the numbers should be higher. Then there's belgium, luxembourg, and switzerland. Data's fake Ren ✉ 12:54, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I would like to add that ethnologue(their website) says french is spoken in 60 countries (they obviously only count those who have french at least semi-official level), but only count 67 million speakers? on this article Ethnologue list of most-spoken languages, it lists french as having 128m speakers (2005 data) but also says that data from 2000 suggested only 77m ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ren Sydrick (talk • contribs) 13:02, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Irish

Listed twice, 1.6 M or 350000 ? 350000 sounds far too little. 80.186.147.214 (talk) 11:07, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

I notice that Irish is listed twice with the same status (position #200 and #323). Geekfox (talk) 13:45, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Spanish

Why in french wikipedia the number of spanish speakers is higher?... It seems that anglophones try to deny the high number of NATIVE spanish speakers around the world, which I see as a stubborn attitude. I mean, if we are going to talk about the most spoken language in the world then english is undubitably the mosy spoken, but here we are talking about native speakers. About chinese I can't understand what's your concept of native speaker, when the most of chinese people speak a dialect as native language, at home, and Mandarin as a second language for official things. In this respect english should have more native speakers and the same with spanish. -Roberto.

I agree, like I've just mentioned on the Portuguese language section (which has the same origin of Spanish and are very similar). The English numbers are incredible inflationated, and they forget all the countries on South America, Central America, Africa, Europe, and even in the East like China (Macau) or Timor-Lest and other countries, which are Spanish and Portuguese native speakers countries, not counting with second language countries (like in USA where the second language is Spanish and has 300M inhabitants).

If we add the small number (should be bigger) of 438M native Spanish inhabitants to for example only the 300M second language USA inhabitants, only with that small sum we'ld get already more than 700M spanish speakers. This just to start.

In the Portuguese Language the errors are even bigger. In in Brazil around 100% speak Portuguese (not counting tourists and native indians), and it has 190M, Portugal 10M, and with Angola and Mozambique reaches more than 240M, and lots of countries are missing, how can they put only 170M native Portuguese speakers?

We must not forget that the Iberian Empire (Portugal+Spain in Filipe's dinasty) was the biggest empire ever, having in Europe (Portugal + Spain + Italy + Dutchland), All the South and Central America, part of North America (USA), the entire Africa coast under control with many countries, India, Maldives, Timor, Macao (part of China), and many more. It's natural that many hundreds of millions on those places speak Spanish or Portuguese still. And English speakers are always reducing these two empire's History. I recall when it was proven that Portuguese found Australia on mid 1500's, 200 years before Cook, with relics and ships found there, and everywhere evertbody forgets that and only want to say it was Cook 200 years later that discovered it. I think History should not be manipulated or forgotten. In Languages I see the same manipulation happening.

In my point of view we should sum the countrie's populations as native speakers, and put a column at right as second language speakers. With that, Portuguese (like Galician) and Spanish languages, would reach more than 700M native speakers, and if we ass USA 300M as second language Spanish (alone) would reach 1 billion speakers. It's normal to speak Spanish in USA as USA was already a Spanish territory (or Iberic in the fusion of Portugal and Spain in the Filipe's dinasty) some centuries ago.

And yeah, we could tell that there are billions and billions speaking English everywhere, but how to prove that? Why inflating so much that number? India had already a Portuguese Oficial language and it's still spoken in some places there, and we wouldn't be counting that in to estimates.

So I agree, there continues to happen that the English Language defenders forget the dozens of countries of Spanish language native speakers and its brother language Portuguese, reduce its numbers and try to inflate the English speakers (don't know why).

Gonçalo/Gonzalo User:Crashh 06:36, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

This entire article is worthless. None of its hundreds datums is statistically significant which is a good enough reason to erase it all. Moreover, although each of its hundreds datums was calculated in its unique method, all the datums are compared. Garbage in/garbage out!Eddau (talk) 00:13, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Rid this article of SIL

1. This table features many strange numbers. The number of Thai speakers is only 20 millions according to SIL. Ok, but why even include SIL as they clearly don't have a clue, the lowest estimation I've ever seen is 50 millions, the Wikipedia article on Thai claims 60-65 millions. So one Wikipedia article gives three times as Thai speakers as another.
2. I do agree with the above. Thai speakers range from 60 million to 65 million. There is no way that only 20.5 million people speak Thai. Please make sure this change is noted because this falsifies and underestimates the popularity of the Thai language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aznsiamboi (talk • contribs) 21:38, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
3. Persian is just as funny, again the SIL guess (I cannot call it an estimate) is about 1/3 of the what the article on Persian says. If SIL would be correct, not even half the Iranians would speak Persian.
4. I'm Swedish, and the things SIL invent about Swedish is just hillarious, inventing many new languages that nobody has ever heard of, calling dialects that were never anything else than Swedish dialects for languages, and inventing fantastically high numbers of speakers. I guess they do the same thing in many other countries, dividing many languages into umpteen new languages that nobody except those as SIL knows about.
5. I propose we rid this article of SIL, it simply cannot be trusted. There are so many good linguistic sources available that we do not need a really bad one. 195.148.181.4 (talk) 10:56, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree, Ethnologue should probably be removed from this article for several reasons. One reason is the fact that there already is an article ranking languages according to Ethnologue. Another reason is that the IP is correct, Ethnologue is not trustworthy. I just reverted from a version claiming less than 65 million French speakers in the World, a version that was supported by the Ethnologue. I'm sure the user had the best intentions but when the claims of a source is completely out-of-line, I don't see the use in reinserting it just because there is a source claiming so. May I conclude with reminding people that Ethnologue is not a linguistic organisation, it is an evangelical christian missionary with the main aim of translating the bible. That is all fine and fair, but when we start to rely on such an organisation rather than on actual linguistic and socio-linguistic research, we're moving close to WP:OR even though we claim to have a source. As a professional linguist, I can say that I've found Ethnologue to be wrong more often than I've found them to be right for the languages I know best. The IP above have listed some languages, I could list many more if needed, but that's more relevant in the article about Ethnologue. Here, I would welcome a discussion about whether to include data from Ethnologue at all. Yes, it is the most easily accesible and thus the easiest to use without having to go through volumes of linguistic and demographic research. If only it were accurate everything would be fine, but it's not.JdeJ (talk) 13:15, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Until a consensus is reached that Ethnologue can be completely removed from the article, then you cannot just pick and choose what numbers you put in that column. Either the source is reliable or it isn't. If the consensus is reached that it is not reliable, than how can any figures be used from this source at all? I believe Ethnologue is outdated in many cases, but I think it was agreed upon before for consistency sake to use similar sources for every language. The 3rd column over is for other sources.

If concensus cannot be reached to remove Ethnologue figures, maybe the top languages can be ranked by the Encarta estimates if people think they are more updated, but I think the ranking should be based on the same source though rather than people just picking different sources. Kman543210 (talk) 13:51, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

"Either the source is reliable or it isn't. If the consensus is reached that it is not reliable, than how can any figures be used from this source at all?" I agree, that is the point I'm making. We should not use Ethnologue at all in this article. The obvious benefit is that it (claims to) list all languages, thus making it easy to use. The obvious drawback is that it gets its claims wrong most of the time. At the moment, we're claiming rather silly numbers in this article. French is the language I know best of the major languages in the world, and the figure given here is rather bizarre, to be honest.

"I think the ranking should be based on the same source though rather than people just picking different sources" That is a very valid, sound and important point. We need a source to avoid edit wars, and I am in no way arguing for abandoning that principle. I'm just pointing out that although Ethnologue is the most convenient source, it is not a reliable source and its use here makes the article look rather strange. I am looking forward to hearing from other contributors, but I hold on to thinking that Ethnologue must go. Better to use Encarta, as you say.JdeJ (talk) 14:06, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Ok, as nobody seems to disagree with the suggestion to removing the Ethnologue data from the article, I will proceed to implement it. It will of course still be present in the article Ethnologue list of most spoken languages, so no information is removed from Wikipedia. However, I will still wait for a little while before doing the change to allow time for additional comments.JdeJ (talk) 14:49, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

At the bottom of Encarta's table it says "Source: Summer Institute of Linguistics". It also appears that they are using Ethnologue 14. Is there another source that actually lists numbers of speakers for every language? I have heard of David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language, but the last edition of that was published in 1997, and I have heard of claims of inaccuracy from him too. --Baryonic Being (talk) 21:30, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Accuracy

KOREAN LANGUAGE NEEDS UPDATE: KOREAN LANGUAGE SPEAKER AROUND THE WORLD IS 80-88 MILLION. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Korean1language (talk • contribs) 07:08, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

This list claims that Pashto has 60 million speakers without giving any sources. Tājik (talk) 21:43, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Klingon

I did not see any reference to Klingon. I've been to dozens of conventions where this was the prevailing language. Surely, there are many people on this planet who speak this at home. Is there a valid reason to omit or ignore this language, or am I missing something. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.21.215.119 (talk) 18:46, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

LOL @ the faggot

you are missing something, a life and some friends —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.16.236.99 (talk) 15:56, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

The article is about languages by 'native speakers'. Once you point one single native speaker of Klingon we can consider pointing it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Popotão (talk • contribs) 12:00, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Klingon? Prevailing language in conventions? Either those conventions are very small or you're missing something, because, in one hand, the number of FLUENT speakers of Klingon is most probably in the order of magnitude of the dozens worldwide [2]. In the other hand, you have lots of Star Trek fans who learn some Klingon sentences by hart and greet each other in ST conventions by saying "Qapla'!". The confusion arises when other ST fans mistake the second group for the first (much smaller) group.Sebasbronzini (talk) 21:19, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Uqesiton

Is this list complete to the 1 M speaker category? No. At least a quarter of them is missing if Ethnologue is to believed. 80.186.71.30 (talk) 07:06, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Split ?

By List of ISO 639-3 codes, could this article be split? Setting an arbitrary limit to over 1 million speakers could make the list a complete one at some point in the future, other lists would have to be made at the same time, f.e an incomplete List of languages of under one million speakers, list of endangered languages, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.156.87.169 (talk) 10:15, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Sections are mismatched

There's clearly some disfunctionality between the first and second sections past the introduction. The first section is titled Top 20 and the second one is called 10 to 60 million native speakers.

The immediate problems are that Italian, with 61.5M native speakers identified by Ethnologue, has been posted as item #21 in the first section contrary to the sections title. Additonally, Malayalam, with 55.8M speakers, is also ranked as #21 in the following section (the listing of 10-60 million speakers...). A secondary type of problem are non-Ethnologue language sizes being inserted into the 'Ethnologue language size' field, such as that for Telugu (Ethnologue lists the total of all Telugu speakers as 69.7M at their last census, while a contributor has inserted a non-Ethnologue figure of 74.0M speakers based on a Government of India survey in 2001). Other contributors are carelessly inserting Listverse and Encarta figures into the Ethnologue field as well, creating an 'apples-and-orange' mashup which makes the rankings useless.

First fix: since the list is principally ordered by size groupings of the world's languages, the first section should be renamed to "Languages with over 60 million speakers", which would be consistent with the descriptions of the other sections on this webpage.

Second fix: Telugu was apparently downrated in an earlier version of this article, which a contributor dealt with at a later point, by erroneously inserting a non-Ethnologue figure (thus creating the situation of Italian moving from ranking #20 to 21). In order to have an meaningful article the Ethnologue column needs to be purged of non-Ethnologue listings, which will be moved to the 'Other Estimates' column. At that point the table can be re-ranked by the Ethnologue listings.

What will be particularly useful is to obtain a complete listing of the 2005 edition of Ethnologue in Excel table format, which I haven't been able to locate. Please advise if you've seen such an official Ethnologue list and provide its website, which will be helpful in correcting the above.

Comments? --HarryZilber (talk) 16:42, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Way to go girl!-SK-luuut (talk) 10:30, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Bahasa Indonesia vs Indonesian

Currently the article has both "Bahasa Indonesia" (rank 50) and "Indonesian" (rank 52). "Bahasa Indonesia" is simply the name of the language in the Indonesian language. I believe there is no doubt that one of the two must go, but we will need to reconcile the difference of the number of native speakers. I tried looking in the source, but couldn't find the page about the ranking. --Joshua ^{Say "hi" to me!}_{What I've done?} 07:45, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Silesian

According to its Wikipedia page there are ~56,000 speakers, a number derived from the Polish census. I don't know enough to modify the main page, so will leave it to people who do. 82.132.139.32 (talk) 07:47, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Croatian language

Croatian language and serbian language differenc!

Serbo-Croatian language does not exist!

Serbo-Croatian language does not exist! There are independent languages: 1 Croatian language, 2 Serbian language, 3 Bosnian language! http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=hrv http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3

There is also this:http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=hbs Munci (talk) 18:01, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Outdated sources

Ethonologue has a 2009 update. Why is the 2005 information here?. Here is the 2009 update:

http://www.ethnologue.org/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size

UMMMM. May it be because it places Spanish second before English in terms of native speakers? Anglo-Nationalism again? It is a plague in Wiki.

Upps

Hello, I have doubt [3] has been updated. If carefully be investigated, that the site has very old data, long before to 80's. In my opinion www.ethnologue.com shouldn't be referred until the site be updated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cenkdemir (talk • contribs) 16:47, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned references in List of languages by number of native speakers

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of List of languages by number of native speakers's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "speakers":

• From Swedish language: "Ethnologue report for Swedish". Retrieved 2009-02-09. gives the number of 8,789,835, but is based on data from 1986. Sweden has currently a population of 9.2 Mio (2008 census), and there are about 290,000 native speakers of Swedish in Finland "Statistics Finland - Population Structure". Retrieved 2009-02-09., based on data from 2007), leading to an estimate of about 9 to 10 Mio.
• From Macedonian language: Although the precise number of speakers is unknown, figures of between 1.6 million (from ethnologue) and 2–2.5 million have been cited, see Topolinjska (1998) and Friedman (1985). The general academic consensus is that there are approximately 2 million speakers of the Macedonian language, accepting that "it is difficult to determine the total number of speakers of Macedonian due to the official policies of the neighbouring Balkan states and the fluid nature of emigration" Friedman (1985:?).

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 21:54, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Strange classification

Why is English in second position. Using the Etnologue estimate it is 3rd, after Spanish, and the Ethnologue from 2009 seems to be the one used for the classification and not the Encarta 2006. In fact if the Encarta estimates are used Engoish is behind Hindi and Arabic, in 4rth position. I think it is one of those clear cases of both cheeky abuse and English chauvinism of the worst kind if it is not just a mistake. Someone should correct that. Hof. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.55.201.2 (talk) 14:14, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

That's because what's currently the order is an average of the Ethnologue and Encarta estimates. You can well change everything back to being arranged only by Ethnologue, in which case it would have Spanish second. Munci (talk) 11:43, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Inserted 'estimated' on many 'ranking columns' since I sincerely doubt that someone has counted every child who has learned to speak.80.186.230.60 (talk) 16:56, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Split-off languages from Hindi

Some languages are not represented in the table e.g. Rajasthani and the reason is that they were formerly included as part of Hindi but now they are not. Should they be added to the Hindi estimate or added in separately? Munci (talk) 11:43, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

The point should definitely be brought up. Maybe add a range for Hindi and clearly footnote it so the issue of Hindi being a macrolanguage can be discussed fully. Gizza^{Discuss ©} 06:31, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Russian is under-ranked

Russian was universally known, albeit not always at native speaker level, throughout the former Soviet Union. With low birth rates across post-Soviet states after its collapse, and furthermore continued Russian as a second language and Russian as a second state language (Belarus) instruction in many countries, the vast majority of ex-Soviet countries' residents still have some to native command of Russian. In Russia and Belarus, knowledge and use are at nearly 100% of the population, while in the Ukraine, it is known on par with Russian, but ranges from primary daily language to frowned upon based on political affiliation and region. Just Russia+Belarus+Ukraine put the estimated number of Russian speakers past 200 million, but that estimate disregards other ex-Soviet states (especially Kazakhstan, where Russian is used more than the national language, according to Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/109228/Russian-Language-Enjoying-Boost-PostSoviet-States.aspx?version=print) and vast numbers of people who learned Russian as a second language in primary schools outside the USSR, from Eastern Bloc countries to Soviet allies like Cuba, China, North Korea, or Vietnam. Furthermore, the wikipedia article Russian language puts the number of speakers at 278 million. I am changing the number to 278 million and would suggest a further review, as it seems likely the number is actually over 300 million. Aadieu (talk) 23:38, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Bugger, this is native speakers. Never mind. However, do notice that Russian IS still an official language of four countries, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, not just Russia, the Ukraine still has about 50% native Russian speakers, and large ethnic Russian minorities exist in countries such as the Baltic States. Too difficult to compute for yours truly, though - pity. Aadieu (talk) 23:42, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, not everyone in Russia speaks Russian as a first language. I don't see any figures for what percentage do but considering the ethnic Russian make 79% of the population, the first language Russian speakers is somewhere between 79% and 99% of the population. And being an official language doesn't necessarily mean there are many people who speak it as a first language. I do think it's weird that all 11 million first language Russian speakers are treated as immigrants to the Ukraine by ethnologue:[4]. They seem to have included it in the figures for Russian overall though, otherwise they wouldn't have made the jump from 116 million to 144 million:[5]. Munci (talk) 00:14, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

As I understand it, young children (<4, maybe) are not considered speakers of any language. john k (talk) 01:19, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Hindi/Urdu ... Arabic: Urgent Action Necessary!

Hindi and Urdu are different languages...it is unfair to classify them as one and combine the total number of speakers! They should be split and placed based on their respective number of speakers.

Also, the Ethnologue divides arabic into 16 different dialects...since these are mutually intelligible, only the count of Encarta should be used...thus placing arabic at over 400 million speakers. The ~200 million is completely wrong...there are more than 200 million people in the arab countries alone, and that's putting aside all the muslim arab speaks in non-arab countries!

If you use mutual intelligibility as an argument to push Arabic up the rankings, the same can be said of Hindi and Urdu then. Technical vocabulary nor a writing script cannot be used to split a langauge, except for political/relgious reasons. In fact a large number of (poo) people in the Hindi/Urdu belt probably cannot read and wouldn't know the Sanskrit or Perso-Arabic vocabulary (except for those words which have entered common speech on both sides). Gizza^{Discuss ©} 06:20, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Philippines

2009 estimate: 94,377,140 population and like 90mil Filipino speakers. maybe like 40mil+ second language... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Joshuamiguel (talk • contribs) 16:28, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Like 90 million total speakers. But this is for native speakers only. And please cite sources. This is sourced to ethnologue. Munci (talk) 17:52, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Simplified world languages map

Perhaps

this map can be added ?

KVDP (talk) 11:02, 13 December 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.64.58.218 (talk)

The problem with that is that it deals with total speakers, not just native ones this article. Head over to the List of languages by total number of speakers article instead. Munci (talk) 15:45, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Now I've looked at the map, I noticed a few things:

Mistakes:Kaliningrad should be blue like the rest of Russia. Turkey-in-Europe has no colour but Turkey-in-Asia does. French Guiana is a colour on its own rather than the same as French.

Missing:Comoros could be either Arabic or French and Seychelles either French or English. Swahili could be added which would then include Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the aforementioned Comoros absolute minimum but most likely Rwanda,Burundi, Congo DR, Mozambique, Somalia and Oman as well. Farsi could be added like you said.

Hmm:Less than 12% of Japanese speak English.

In general:having some striped would be a good idea. Especially for Singapore where English, Mandarin and Malay are all useful. Munci (talk) 23:19, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

---

Where is the native spanish speakers in USA? At less It´s need red lines in the South of USA. In Andorra 68.70% speak spanish. German is only the first or second language in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Japan is totally bad, Why not also Sweden or Norway have English as a second language intead of Japan and Korea. --Migang2g (talk) 06:53, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

See my comments at Talk:World language#Simplified world languages_map - if you put together the two lists of inconsistencies and errors, it is clear that this map is too misleading to be included in its current state. Knepflerle (talk) 15:40, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Irish

1.6 million is waaay too high. The figures cited in the CSO report given also say that only 80k-ish use it daily, while over a million use it less frequently than weekly. I know that one individual isn't a sample or anything like that, but I'm one of those 1.6m and I'm certainly not a native speaker and never was even close to fluent, and I'd say the same goes for most. I'm not quite sure exactly what this article is meant to list, but that 85,076 figure for daily users outside school is probably far more representative that 1.6m. I'm not sure where you'd find better figures, though, but I'll keep my eyes peeled. Supersheep (talk) 00:08, 21 December 2009 (UTC)