The number you give(>400 mln)is very funny the right figure for native speakers is Egypt=80mln Turkey=1mln Iran=3mln Sudan=25mln Algeria=30mln Morocco=25mln Iraq=25mln KSA=22mln Yemen=22mln Syria=17mln Tunisia=11mln Libya=6mln Jordan=6mln Palestine(with refugees but excluding Jordan)=5mln Lebanon=4mln Kuwait=2mln Oman=2mln Mauritania=2mln UAE=1,5mln Qatar=0,5mln Bahrein=0,5mln Eriteria,Chad,Niger,Mali,Senegal=4mln Total "homeland"arabs=295mln Diaspora Arabs=5mln Total arabs(=arabic speakers)=300mln
I think that the english language is being slightly short handed in this article... Ok, if English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Belize, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Guyana, Isle of Man, Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, Nauru, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Ireland (Hiberno-English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom (various forms of British English), the U.S. Virgin Islands the United States (various forms of American English), and Zimbabwe.. then we should probably up the number of primary speakers of English by..... ALOT...... If the US is going on 300 million people, the united kingdom 60 million, australia 50 million... that passed the 400 million mark already and that's not including the other heap of countries that were just listed. I'm not saying that everyone in these countries only speak english or that it's their primary language, but the overwhelming majority of people in each one of these countries speak english as their main language..... And even if someone started with a particular language as a child, the goal is to identify their primary language, as in the most used and applied language to daily life. If you speak spanish to a handful of relatives, and speak english just as well to the rest of the world... I think it's safe to say that English is a primary language, or maybe a person could have 2 primary languages.... You can check wikipedia.com or other census verifying websites to any of the info I've displayed. Another intersting topic would probably be the influence of the enlgish language throughout the world and how english television, music, the internet, and other mediums greatly expand the engish language's territory.
-- Check your facts before disputing the wikipedia. You claim Australia as 50M people, but it is only 20M https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html Crispincowan 01:27, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
the number of Russian speakers is much higher due to the fact that in the soviet times there were 300M citizens and they were all educated in russian! another 100M + studied and were able to speak in this language. it is highly unreasonable to have just 145M first language speaker, we are talking about language and not ethnicity there are 143M russians in russia (and they all speak in russian) plus 20M russian speakers in Ukraine (all ukrainians know russian - 46M) and all the belarussians speak in russian (10M) millions of russian speakers as a first language in central Asia and so on... http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm test
add up your proposed figures and they're still well below the figure given in the article. the number of second language speakers for many languages do look low but that more indicates that the CIA/WA sources have strict standards of fluency to classify as a second language rather than any errors
Veridis 07:20, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
the 143M russians in russia include kids not yet able to speak & infants, also leave a margin for the dumb, unless its suggested that an year old russian baby is fluent in russian!!
1. French is indeed official in the new states I added. Before reverting, double-check things.
2. If we don't list territories, then we don't reflect the actual geographical spread of the language. New Caledonia is not metropolitan France. They are 11,000 miles apart!
3. The total number I give is not every who has studied French. The total number of people who have studied French at some point in their life is around 500 million (as of 2000), as explained here.
4. You wrote: "The article appears to be an attempt to make French look as important as possible rather than give a straight-forward account." That's a very weak argument sir. The University of Laval website is a very rigorous one, and actually I tend to find that they underestimate the number of Francophones in Africa.
5. Before reverting straight away genuine people contributing to the list, you'd rather check some of the very exagerated numbers already in the list. For instance, the list says that there are 101 million native speakers of German. Well, actually, there are tens of millions of people in Germany who are not native speakers of German. They are native speakers of dialects (Bavarian, Franconian, and so on). Yet they are listed as "native German speakers" here. Why don't you have anything to say about that?
On the other hand, the number of French speakers was ludicrously understimated in the list. Some people have already expressed negative comments about that in the talk page. You should read it. Hardouin 12:48, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Kwami, I'm sorry but your figure for French speakers is absolutely ridiculous. You simply take the 63 million French citizens and add to them the 4 million French-speaking Belgian citizens and you already have 67 million French speakers, which means more than the 65 million people mentionned on the page. Afterwards, you simply cannot consider there are no native French speakers neither in Switzerland, nor in Quebec, nor in the Middle East, nor in Africa. To sum it up, that 65 million French speakers figure is such a joke that absolutely no one can take it seriously. Metropolitan 00:39, 27 April 2006 (UTC).
My personal belief... I really think French Language is spoken by more than 100 million people around the world, but I really believe that this number could never reach 200 million. 264M seems to me quite exaggerated 500M?... Impossible. This is a simple question that could be included in the next census... "What is your native language?" It would solve many problems.
I note that although for French language some very strict measurement rules have been applied, the rules are much more lax for other languages. The Chinese government, for instance, estimates that only 90 million Chinese people really speak standard Mandarin, yet the article says that there are 872 million native speakers. That 872 million figure can only be reached if you add all native speakers of Sichuanese, Beijingnese, Shandongnese, Manchurian, Nanjingnese, etc., which are all very different dialects. Everyone who has been to China knows that someone from Xi'an cannot understand someone from Nanjing speaking in his/her native dialect. Yet all these people are counted as native speakers of "Mandarin" here.
Another example is German. In Germany about 10% of the population (8 million people) is not ethnically German. Furthermore, a vast proportion of the German population are native speakers of dialects (Bavarian, Franconian, Swabian, and so on), and they learn standard German at school. Yet the entire population of Germany was added up to reach the staggering figure of 121 million native speakers of standard German. Why?
So in a nutshell, in this list the native French speakers of Black Africa are not counted, but on the other hand the native Turkish spearkers of Germany are considered "native German" speakers. Sehr merkwürdig, nicht wahr? Hardouin 19:27, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Mutual comprehensibility is not the issue. I'm not really sure about Gallego - the basic issue is that it's closer to Portuguese than to Castilian, and Portuguese is always considered a separate language. In terms of German dialects, I can't present any specific evidence, but neither can you, and, indeed, you have not presented any evidence, just anecdotes and some suggestive vocabulary differences. I will suggest that the specific vocabulary differences you note do not necessarily make the differences between Swabian and standard German any greater than those between British and American English. For instance, I could give you...
And so forth. john k 20:42, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Of course I do not believe that German dialects are simply mere varieties of standard German. I'm just saying that giving a few examples of differing vocabulary are utterly useless. john k 03:53, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Concerning German, one ought to use their (German) common sense. While there are dialects, all speakers would regard themselves as German speaking since they are able to communicate with other Germans. Of course when some dialect speakers are talking quickly to each other, it will be hard for someone from another dialect to understand, but that's the case for English dialects too. I would take the challenge of understanding any dialect speaker, when he's speaking slowly and accentuated. You're obviously not a German, because the examples you listed are partly quite interchangeable (the words Griffel, Doktor, pressend are for example all valid German words, just less common than their synonyms and I suppose that the standard German words are also known and valid dialect words nowadays, just not in common usage. Swiss German shows some significant differences, but they are mostly in pronounciation (That's what my ears tell me at least). Agree with kwami. -- rubenarslan
I am sorry, but Galician and Catalan are not dialects of Castillian. Nowhere you will find such a stament as yours. Please, study linguistics before getting your hands into such a troublesome field. Bgdgz
Recent discussions re French have highlighted a general problem. If a person is completely bilingual (since infancy) which language is their first language? What do we do about black Africans who are bilingual in an African language and French or English or Portuguese? This also applies to Indians who are bilingual between Hindi (etc) and English, etc, etc.
My instinct is to say that there are zero Indians in India for whom English is their first language - ie millions of Indians are of course completely bilingual but they should all automatically be counted as Hindi-speakers not English. So, by the same instinct, I automatically assume the same for Africa. There are millions of Africans who speak English/French fluently but their first language "must" be the African one not English/French. Common sense.
BUT I accept that my instinct is not scientific in any way. The accepted way of deciding which is the first language is to ask which language is spoken at home. Within the context of Europe that means that bilingual members of linguistic minorities should always be included in the total of the minority language - ie every person in the Franch BasquCountry who is bilingual (since infancy) in Basque and French is automaticallly counted as first-language Basque not French. Every person in Wales who is bilingual (since infancy) in Welsh and English is automatically counted as first-language Welsh not English.
This principle seems correct to me in Europe but how does it apply to Africa, India, etc? Are there really any black African families in, say, Nigeria who are bilingual Hausa/English but choose to speak English at home? Hardouin, dicussing the former French colonies, has suggested that some black Africans do choose to use the European language at home. I must confess that I had never considered this possibility. Apart from anything else it seems unpatriotic of them to prefer the ex-colonial language. I had just assumed that, although they were completely bilingual, they would speak an African language within the home. However I am (of course) willing to be corrected on this point.
To summarise, it has always seemed to me to be common sense that ALL black Africans in black Africa must be included in the Hausa, Wolof,etc,etc totals and NONE in the English/French/Portuguese totals. But if it can be shown that some of them do indeed speak a European language at home then I was obviously wrong and we will have to change the Ethnolgue-derived totals to reflect that. Jameswilson 23:05, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
I think it is up to Hardouin to provide some evidence for a substantial number of Africans who speak French (or English, or whatever) in the home. Certainly Ethnologue provides no hint of this, and it's generally been our principal source for figuring out the numbers on this page. Note Ethnologue's listing for French (this doesn't include patois or dialects):
Algeria: 110,600 Andorra: 2,400 Belgium: 4,000,000 Benin: 16,700 Burundi: 2,200 Canada: 6,700,000 Central African Republic: 9,000 Chad: 3,000 Comoros: 1,700 Congo: 28,000 Côte d'Ivoire: 17,470 Djibouti: 15,440 French Polynesia: 25,668 Gabon: 37,500 Guadeloupe: 7,300 Haiti: 600 Lebanon: 16,600 Luxembourg: 13,100 Madagascar: 18,000 Mali: 9,000 Martinique: 9,000 Mauritius: 37,000 Mayotte: 2,450 Monaco: 17,400 New Caledonia: 53,400 Niger: 6,000 Réunion: 2,400 Rwanda: 2,300 Saint Pierre and Miquelon: 5,114 Seychelles: 977 Switzerland: 1,272,000 Togo: 3,000 Tunisia: 11,000 United Kingdom: 14,000 Vanuatu: 6,300 Wallis and Futuna: 120
That is to say - it gives small numbers of native speakers in most African countries, but clearly nowhere near a significant percentage of the population. It should be up to Hardouin to find some evidence which contradicts this. (It ought to be noted that in addition to this, we have several million speakers of French dialects in Europe, and several million speakers of French Creoles in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean) john k 04:24, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Naturally this article is affected by systemic bias. For ethnologue not to consider blacks or africans as native speakers of a european language is typical Systemic bias. Almost all countries in africa use a combination of local languages and European languages(principally french, english, and portuguese). In my home country of Zambia English is the official language, which means all official and government business is conducted in english. All newspapers and majority of television and radio shows are in English. The entire education system from primary school to university is in english. Essentially any who can read or write knows english. This obviously convienient as there almost 72 local dialects. That said Zambians are very proud of their local languages and almost every speaks or understands at least three languages by default- Bemba, Nyanja and English. Most Zambians will switch languages effortlessly depending on the situation eg when speaking to older people or people from rural areas one would use local languages, conversly when speaking with younger people or at work one would use english. I would best describe the use of english as a spectrum or some kind of uniform distribution. There is a small minority on one end who have completely no understanding of english and small minority of on the other end who use english exclusively. The majority in the middle have some ability to use both.
Back to systemic bias as I have digressed quite a bit. The belief in the west is that native speakers of english are only found in the US, UK, Canada and Australia(Basically white britons and british immigrants). Slowly these misconceptions are begining to change. The outsourcing of millions of jobs from the US and Europe to English speaking India is a case in point. In the next half century it is likely that there will be more french speakers in Africa than the rest of the world combined. This due to rising populations in francophone africa.
What do you think will happen in two or three generations time? Will English still be widely spoken in Zambia or will it have been replaced as the language of government and the media by a lingua franca based on an African language? As is happening gradually with Sango in the Central African Republic, for example. Jameswilson 22:42, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
-- Independence didn't necessarily lead to rejection of European languages. As mentioned earlier, There are more languages spoken in sub-saharan africa than any other region on the planet. When the european colonialists carved out africa, it was done with little regard to ethnic or linguistic boundaries. So in many countries there are several languages eg zambia has about 72, nigeria 250. To avoid potential conflicts that could arise if one local language was imposed upon the general population, English was selected as a unifying force.
However in Tanzania, English was rejected and Swahili was adopted as the official language. This was possible as Swahili had been used for thousands of years in East Africa, as a sort of intermediary language between local african tribes and also between africans and arab traders. Because Swahili was used as an intermediary language it is very adaptable to new and foreign linguistic concepts. It is much easier to translate more complex scientific or phylosophical concepts into Swahili than it would be into many other african languages. Non-swahili speaking africans also say swahili is easy to learn. Muntuwandi 03:06, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
And incidentally, the figure for second language KiSwahili speakers is far too low - effectively everyone in Kenya and Tanzania who has ever been to school has at least some Swahili, and large numbers of people in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, parts of Congo - my guess (& it is only a guess) would be 60-80 million. -- KenBrown 14:36, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Bye, folks. I'm leaving the grid for the next year. I've become the default (some would say self-appointed) maintainer of this article, but I won't be able to do this any longer. I'm hoping some of you out there in the wings will take over. This list could really go to seed if we don't keep on top of it -- basically just reverting the steady stream of unsubstantiated edits in populations and where spoken. kwami 17:23, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
As I stated some time ago, Turkish is currently not an official language in Bulgaria. After all, I am from Bulgaria, and I would have been the first to know if our constitution had been changed. Yes, I know it's listed as "regional" language on some sites, but this doesn't change the facts. I will repeat what I said before: a lot of people speak Turkish here (can't recall the exact percentage), but for now Bulgarian is the only official language. If you look at the Bulgaria page in Wikipedia, you'll see that it alsa says so. The Constitution of Bulgaria says so too. So let's keep the information in this article correct. -- Mégara (Мегъра) - D. Mavrov 20:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
I presume that "CIA" refers to the online CIA World Factbook. But I cannot find any statistics there that refer specifically to the number of native English speakers. On the other hand, I did find this reference for a number of native English speakers equalling 322 million. (Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999)). If some cannot give me a clear link to/reference for the figure of 308 million, I will replace it with the claim and reference I have. -- Susurrus 08:00, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
I say why not use calculations or estimates from The World Factbook (2006 Edition) to settle the dispute this page rages from time to time?. AshrafSS 17:19, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I've read this article but I've not found the source of all numbers of speakers. What is this article? A Wikipedia's research? A combination of differents sources? In this last case which was the discriminant to choose a number and not another? IMHO this is a "research" and this is an original reasearch, not verifiable, and this is also NPOV because Wikipedia has chosen statistics without indicating the parameters on this. For example, who choosed to merge Swiss German with Standard German? These are very different languages and in Swiss people speak Swiss Germ ( emmanisch) as 1st language and standard german as 2nd language (I live in Swiss)?
The interpretations are two (as I can believe because there is any preface to the list):
In this case I can believe this article "original" and "NPOV". The right approach should be the same as you can see in italian Wikipedia indicating different statistics ("this institute, this organization publishes this statistic not wikipedia") with comments. In this example Wikipedia takes no choose, indicates all points of view with references and comments as an NPOV article should be done, and we have a less number of flame.
At last I've had the opportunity to verify the En-Wikipedian censorship, Ok, fortunately there are some tools to control it. I've seen some proposal and an user who accept or not accept these: is this the correct approach for an wikipedian article? or this approach shows it that there is a (big!!!) problem on this article? -- Ilario 13:22, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Why are Cantonese and other languages included as part of Chinese when they are plainly different languages from Mandarin? ( Stpaul 11:30, 2 June 2006 (UTC))
It's a disputed fact whether Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects or Languages by themselves. However, it is generally accepted that they are dialects of the same language. (Chinese) I hope this helps a bit. Footballrocks41237 02:11, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Cantonese generally do not write what they say, when they write, they write in the language identical to what "Chinese"(I mean "Standard Spoken Chinese" speakers, i.e. so called "Mandarin" speakers) speak and write.
Something is clearly wrong. English should be #1 because 2 billion people speak it to some degree, where as 'Chinese' is a highly fragmented set of loosely related languages. By that criteria English again be on top because you'd have to add German, Dutch and the Scandanavian languages. Cameron Nedland 02:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
There is a highly fragmented set of loosely related Chinese languages, but the Chinese language, i.e. the Manadarin language, is one standardised language spoken throughout China and elsewhere. 129.12.200.49 14:31, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
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umm... I noticed it says on the page and some other pages that spanish is third (sometimes fourth) whilst english is fourth (sometimes third) yet most pages on the internet and some books put it at either number two or three. Are the internet sites and books misguided, if not can someone fix it. I would but I can't really be bothered.
here are some links I found: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html (-this one refers to ethnologue too) http://www.linguasphere.org/language.html http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0724-unesco.html
p.s. and the numbers on the page don't add up if u tally up the populations of the nations mentioned(AND counting india at about 300 million etc.) some one should really fix, I would but I can't be bothered.
(UTC)
Why is Latin listed while, for example, Icelandic (another official state language, but with more speakers) isn't?
Do we really have to use a separate table for Chinese & Hindi? It looks broken and confused me before I saw the note in the page source. Moskvax 01:16, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
According to the 2002 Republic of Ireland census, 1.6 million there can speak Irish, while 165,000 can speak it in Northern Ireland and 25,000 use it regulary in the USA. Should it be on the table?
WARNING, I removed a racist insult probably written by the racists of Italian Northern League under the voice "Zulu". You probably didn't understand: Italian racists use the world "zulu" in the meaning of savage or ignorant. Meaning this, the writer added that "zulu" was spoken in Sicily (which isn't) and included "other terronian lands". The word "terrone" is an insult based over the Italian word "terra" (land) given by racists of northern league to southerners of Italy, who were, in ancient times, mainly peasants. Nowadays, of course, southern Italy is more cultured and advanced of north, having a very higher rate of graduated then north. PLEASE, identify the author of this racist insult. Val
I didn't understand why portuguese is ranked 7th. Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay, are different languages, can't be counted as one. And Arabic are not mutually intelligible. I propose portuguese must be ranked as 5th, once we are counting native speakers only. If Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay can be summed why not sum Portuguese with Spanish, they are completely mutually intelligible.
Look at this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_distribution_of_Portuguese there if we calculate the values, we will obtain a number greater than the one showed on the rank (we will obtain 230 million). And I still haven't seen all the varieties of Arabic separte. I hope this update could be done pretty soon. See ya.
This is a complete insane list concerning Portuguese.... Only in Brazil we have around 187 millions native speakers + around 11 millions in Portugal, we get 198 million, only in this two countries! A number very different than 174 millions.
I understand that we are only by popular concept and not by mutual intelligibiliy. I just did a comparison in the previous scrap. Just to point out that Indonesian and Malay cannot be summed.
Another thing to point out is that Indonesian is just second language in Indonesia, coexisting wiht Javanese and many other distinct languages. And the people of East Timor do not speak Indonesia primarilly, in East Timor around 15% speaks Portuguese and the other 85% speaks Tetum.
Well as you said you already have the corrections in your hands, I hope we can see it posted in Wikipedia pretty soon.
Thank You!!!
Shouldn't Indonesian be at number six? Between Arabic and Portuguese? 203.118.32.120 07:33, 1 December 2006 (UTC)Tiddysmith 1/12/06
The numerics for English have been totally under-estimated. If you add the population of the United States and the United Kingdom alone you're 50 mil over the total estimate. Not to mention the other countries of the Commonwealth of Nations which all exclusively use English.
I'll attempt to add them up and get a figure based on each countries wiki entry. It's no one has picked up on this before. Jachin 08:30, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
You must not sum simply all the population account. If you do that the list will became inaccurate. And.... every in India speaking English, you´re joking you know! With more than 600 Millions of its population living below the poverty line, and considering the fact that Hindi and English are completely different in grammar structure, alphabet and phonology you´re out of your mind. And just to finish... This list is only for NATIVE SPEAKERS, not every that has a contact with English. I don't know how many languages do you speak, but I can assure you that the second language you speak, you're not completely able to understand and express yourself without a paraphrasis, or stop to think how you must say something. (Unless, you borned bilingual). For sure English is the most important language in world nowaday, but not every is native to it, and are fully capable to express itself like an American or English does. And I really believe that PERHAPS, the number of second language speakers must be wrong, but definitilly the number of first language usage is correct (for the year that are referenced in). Robledo
I agree in charge with you Pedro, but try looking the wikipedia in Portuguese, I made the portuguese version and correct some mistakes of the version in English, but I'm still finishing it and looking for all kind of sources. That's I removed all the references, but I'll put it again later. Robledo
The article for Languages in the United States and the CIA world factbook linked below both state that 82% of the population of the United states (300 million as of 2006) speak english natively. This gives a total of 246 million native speakers of english in the US alone. if this ranking article is correct then the entire native english speaking population of the US (246 million) plus the united kingdom (60 million total population - minus about 25% of the total population of wales of 3 million or 0.75 million for 59.25 million english speakers) plus Canada (33 million population total 60% english for 20 million) plus Australia (20 million total 80% english for 16 million) gives a total of 341 million native english speakers allowing a population of only *negative* 33 million speakers in *all* other native english speaking populations in the world (308 million(article total) minus 341 million (english speaking total for US + UK + Canada + australia)). How can there be such a large negative population of english speakers in all of the other countries?
Here are the links to pages that back up the populations and percentages given for:
The USA: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
The United Kingdom: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html
Canada: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ca.html
Australia: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html
using the language percentages and total populations from those links makes the 308 million native english speaker total simply impossible.
If no links can be shown to back up the 308 million total in a way that addresses the existing native speaker totals for *at least* those 4 countries (341 million) then I will change the article to the totals for those 4 countries rather than the absurd 308 million figure currently shown. Granted my total of 341 million native speakers ignores millions of native english speakers in all other countries but it would still be a dramatic improvment over the existing figure.
I completely agree about the UK figure but take note that the existing figure cites "cia" (presumably world factbook) as its source and if you look at the Uk entry in the CIa world factbook you will find that for language breakdown it only lits 25% of the population of wales as the non native english speaking population. I am simply using the reference cited in the article. Also take note that the entries for the other 3 countries in the cia world factbook are far less ambiguous simply stating the percentage of the total population that are native speakers of english.
Reviewing the discussion so far I see this number (308 million) has been questioned for some time already. I am going to go ahead and change it to the modest minimum total of 341 million I determined now. It is probably still too low but it is an obvious improvement over the existing figure.
HEY, WE HAVE A PARCIAL ACCOUNT HERE. THE 308MILLIONS IS FOR 2004 AND NOT FOR 2006. IF WE ARE TO UPDATE THE NUMBER, WE MUST UPDATE SPANISH AS WELL. AND TELL ME SOMETHING, WHY ENGLISH MUST BE AT THE TOP ALWAYS? YOU SIMPLY DON'T LIKE TO BE OVERPASSED BY ANYONE ELSE??? WHAT'S THE MATTER, WE ARE NOT THE BEST IN EVERYTHING!!!
Why don't you take a look at this same article in Portuguese.... The number seems quite the same you did.
What on Earth? now the article reports 425 million native speakers of english. Even assuming that every single inhabitant of the US, the UK, Australia and Canada were native english speakers I don't think the total would approach such a number. The rest of the countries (ireland, new zealand, south africa, etc) certainly don't have the population to make up the difference. Does any know where the 425 million native speakers figure comes from? Are there several million Indians who learn english as a first language or something?
Zebulin 16:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I've disputed the acuracy of this article because it refers numerous times to a mysterious CIA document from 2004 without any further details. If someone knows what this document is, please cite the details correctly. If this document is the CIA world factbook, I'm not sure that we should use it; it is very unclear what they mean by counting someone as speaking a language. It is not at all obvious if they mean as his or her main daily language or first language or some type of fluency level or what. If we can't find a better source I think we should revert everything to the numbers from Ethnologue. It would be a shame to use so much 1984 data, though and it seems that the number of English speakers is something of a contetious issue. The Ethnologue puts this at 309 million [3] (using data from various times between 1970 and 2004). I don't think people would stand for that, but there is little point in just guessing numbers out of thin air. I think that the Ethnologue is the most widely respected source and may be as accurate as we can get, but if people think it is out of date there is a vaguely accademic article from 2001 here comparing a number of sources. This may serve as a jumping off point to find a more satisfactory sum. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cwlq ( talk • contribs) .
Hungarian, Polish and German (not Yiddish) are all spoken in Israel, and i know some people who speak each of them. They are alive and well and not necessarily very old. There are daily newspapers in Hungarian and German and maybe Polish too. Ethnologue supports that.
I haven't met any Ukrainian speakers in Israel personally. All those who came to Israel from Ukraine spoke Russian. Ethnologue doesn't list Israel as a country where Ukrainian is spoken, however i am not erasing Israel from the list, because first of all, some children who learned Ukrainian in school in the 90's may prefer it to Russian and secondly, a local satellite TV provider started showing a Ukrainian channel lately. So maybe there is truth to that claim. -- Amir E. Aharoni 07:23, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
If Spanish and Hindi have 390M and 370M native speakers respectively, why is Hindi above Spanish? Similarly why is Bengali (171M) above Arabic (206M) and French (120M) above Japanese (127M), etc? Lfh 14:22, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
I was just going to say the same. I think that since there is over 300 million people in the Arab world, so 206M is definately too small. I don't know how to edit the template, though.-- Fox Mccloud 14:37, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
People, Arabic is a ethinicity, but they are different languages. The Arabic spoken in the Lebanoon, is not comprehensible in the Argelia. It would the same as we sum all latin people, then we would have Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian and Spanish altogether.... I think we should make distinctions in this case, we must put Maghreb Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Egyptian Arabic. Otherwise, we must put together, Portuguese-Spanish, Indonesian-Malay, Norsk-Swedish-Danish, this languages are almost the same with little variation while Arabic is not.Robledo
Ifeldman84: I really don't know anyone personally anyone who speaks Ukrainian, but i didn't delete your edit - just marked it with {{fact}}. Most of the information in this article is based on Ethnologue and it doesn't say that anyone speaks Ukrainian in Israel. If you can prove that anyone does, you are welcome to send me your source for that.
Please stop changing the article without any proof. -- Amir E. Aharoni 05:14, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
I notice Hindi and Urdu have two seperate entries. However, they are widely considered to be two terms for the same language (albeit implying differences in the script used to write the language). Should they not have one entry? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.12.200.49 ( talk • contribs) 14:26, 29 September 2006.
The issues mentioned above mix up several categories, such as socio-linguistics, grammar, vocabulary etc. And there is of course the political and socio-political (including religious) angle, which played and plays a major role in the formation of what is today modern Hindi in the Nagari script and a Sanskritised vocabulary. But such blurring of categories is nothing unusual in the discourse on Hindi/Urdu, so maybe one should be pragmatic and stick to the official categorisations in South Asia. — However, there is another problem, namely that of the so-called "varieties" and "dialects" of Hindi. As anyone conversant with the problematics of defining "language" and "dialect" knows, these classifications are often arbitrary, and this is, in the case of Hindi, now even so in official usage in India, where Maithili is now a Schedule Eight language, and Bhojpuri is bound to follow in a few years' time. This incongruity has not gone unnoticed even in the Indian parliament, where an MP tried to make a distinction between "bhasha" and "boli" to nevertheless subsume Maithili under Hindi even though it is now officially a separate language (as it always was to the Sahitya Akademi, as well as various universities in Bihar and Nepal). Some of today's "dialects" or "varieties" of Hindi were actually the literary languages in use in northern India before Khari Boli (e.g. Braj, Awadhi, Maithili), and are in part still used in such a function independently of Khari Boli. One could go on an on about this issue, but these example should suffice. From which it follows that there is clearly a lot to be thought about in the context of "Hindi". Anuragi 08:29, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Hm here's a bigger problem. The Hindi estimate is based on a 1991 census estimate seeing as thats 17 years ago, and India has surpassed a billion people I think that there are quite a bit more than that, I think we need an update. I'm Bengali and I can definitely say that there is no way that there are more Bengali speakers than "Hindi" speakers. I am confused though, are these numbers based on Native speakers or on population in the country? Because English in particular is acquired a lot, which is why it's such a common global connection. Encyclopedia5988 23:42, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I think some sort of clarification of how this magical 480 million number is achieved. India has a population of about 1.1 billion. I'm unsure how many non-resident Hindi speakers speak Hindi as a first language especially beyond first generation. For example, Kenyans of Indian origin speak Hindi but their native language/first language tends to be Swahili especially beyond first generation of immigration.
However, considering the populous non-Hindi-speaking Southern, Northern, Eastern and Western states in India, and the few Central states that partially speak Urdu (which I'm considering to be a distinct language as it is unintelligible to Hindi speakers in written or formal oral form), it astonishes me that still half of the country is supposed to be native Hindi speakers. Plus if one considers ethonologue report from 1998, Hindi was rated much lower in terms of population. Has Hindi population really doubled in 8 years? It's a little dubious. I smell a little bit of exaggeration for nationalistic reasons (as someone mentioned above) although I could be wrong of course :). Could someone shed some light on this?
Thanks you.
64.194.250.99 19:12, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I can let you know how this figure should have been higher. Population of Uttar Pradesh - 180 million , erstwhile Bihar 120 miilion , Madhya Pradesh - 90 Million , Rajasthan - 80 million , Delhi - 12 million and smatterings of Hindi speaking people all over the country e.g Mumbai at least 30% of 15 million = 5 million speak hindi as first language. Hindi as I believe in sheer numerical terms should be 2nd most populous language. Someone said Urdu being not intelligible to hindi people that is like saying US people do not understand UK english because it has a nasle twang to it.
Thanks
According to the articles Pashto and Pashtun people, the number of Pashto-speakers is ca. 40m (35m being the lowest assumption, while 45m being the highest). This should be updated in this article which still states that Pashto has only 27m native speakers.
Tājik 20:10, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Presumably there are many people in Afghanistan (and perhaps in Pakistan as well) who speak Pashto without it being their native language. john k 03:47, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Can we make the numbers a little more concrete? How about using this. - Peregrinefisher 17:56, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Should ASL be considered in the list? although not a traditional language it does have 20mil 'speakers'.
and cite sources for every bit of information here. It is a nightmare to fix this article if there is constant fiddling with numbers without comment or attribution. Edits such as this one, apparently made from some sort of gut conviction rather than a specific source, should be reverted on sight. dab (ᛏ) 11:09, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
SIL has:
Hindi estimates fluctuate particularly, placing Hindi/Urdu anywhere between 2nd and 5th place. dab (ᛏ) 11:18, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
vasque or euskera is spoken in the Vasque Country and Navarra in the north of Spain, I don't know exactly the number of native speakers but it is an important lenguge in Spain.
As for Maninka language the order given is wrong. The article did not account for Maninka, Jula or Bamanankan speakers in Burkina Faso, in Ivory Coast and even in Gambia. I would like to take this remark into consideration.
The second remark is, in the classification, you seperated the Maninka and the Bambara, though they make the same language Mandekan. Assuming Maninka, Bamanankan and Jula are varieties of the same language, Bamanankan has 2.8 million native speakers plus 10 million second language speakers, making 13 million plus 3.3 million accounted for Maninka and all its varities would be estimated to 16.3 million. Accordingly, kindly take this fact into account when editing the page next time, speakers of Jula in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast are not still not accounted for.
A great misleading shows that some trying to show that there are lot of English Speakers in world. It is very blunder. And misleading. Please correct It. English native speakers are very less. We can see English speaking people in Metro cities of India. But it is negligible when it compare to Hindi. It is same case of HongKong . Even world famous actor Jackie Chan don't know English well known. Selavaraj 09:23, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I imagine it is a negligible amount, but Navajo may be worth investigation to be added to the list of endangered languages. Though the population of the American reservation is only 300,000, it IS an official language, and there has been a concerted effort on the part of the population to teach it to children and incorporate it in a primarily english speaking environment. just offering it for consideration. Nastynorth 10:20, 25 December 2006 (UTC)—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nastynorth ( talk • contribs) 10:19, 25 December 2006 (UTC).
There's a problem with multiple sources here, and some people doing their own calculations. OK, I admit it, I've done that (with discussion) for Arabic, as the ethnologue figure did seem clearly too low. But for this list the same source should be used for all the languages. My question is, which one? The ethnologue is the most widely used language reference, so that would be the default, but not the only choice. CIA doesn't seem to always cover the issue consistently. The other lists don't seem to go lower than the top 13 or so, so could not be used for consistency. SO I'd propose using the ethnolgue figures, imperfect as they are. Or you could have differnet lists, according to XXX...
Your opinions please! -- Drmaik 21:29, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
Number | Ethnologue | CIA | etc. |
---|---|---|---|
1 |
Chinese, Mandarin xy.z million speakers |
Chinese, Mandarin xz.y million speakers |
etc. |
Obviously, that would need some work, but that would be the theory. Sectori 00:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
After having read many of the discussions on this page, I would agree that the only way to make this page valuable would be to compile a table as suggested here. Preferably with a short description on how the data was compiled by the agencies in the list. I'm rather unexperienced with wikipedia, but maybe a vote on this issue could be called? User:manfalk
What about Indonesian language? How come it is not listed here? Though the external link says it is on ranking number 8 or 9? 84.44.224.140 15:11, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
What about eg Cantonese (71m+ speakers). This link gives a lot more detail: http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/may/SinoTibetanLanguageFamily.htm. Also, should Urdu (Pakistan) not be included in the Hindi section? 81.6.227.76 10:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
This page is very inconsistent in dealing with Chinese languages. Obviously, this page tries to distinguish Mandarin with other Chinese languages/dialects (Cantonese, Wu, Min, etc.), but it overlooks the basic fact: even if you count Cantonese etc. as separate languages, native speakers of these languages in China usually speak Mandarin as good as a native Mandarin speaker, or at least, understand it well while listening or reading. They should at least be considered to speak Mandarin as a second language. Therefore, the speaker of Mandarin should be around 1.2 billion, rather than the 800 million listed here. Moreover, if you wanna count Cantonese, Wu etc. as separate languages, where are they in this table? Wu has native speaker of about 100M, while Cantonese added another 80~90M, both should be in top 25, but both are not listed.
I took out Namibia as a country where German is spoken officially because since 1990 it has lost that status, putting it instead as an area where significant communities do indeed speak it. BTW, I do believe that this page would portray more interesting and relevant information if we changed it to encompass only individual, mutually intelligible languages, thus for example having only Mandarin on top (instead of all the chinese languages summed up together). The same applies to Arabic. Cheers Pedrassi 10:29, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
In fact, I think I'll do that now. Pedrassi 10:29, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm taking out Eritrea as a country where Italian is officially spoken because the country doesn't have any official language. English and Arabic(together with other local ones) are generally used as working languages there. In fact, Italian seems to be pretty much dead in Africa (it has just about disappeared from Somalia as well). Pedrassi 20:52, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
What happened to arabic? Even if there are dialecs, 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
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
Is there a reason why arabic isnt on the list anymore? just something I noticed. -- The Fear 01:18, 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 [6], 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)
Note : It is always difficult to calculate the number of real French-speaking people in the world, because many people in Africa and North Africa, for example, usually speak, all the time, French and are not counted like native French-speaking people.
Don't rebot, please, I move again for a good comprehension.
sincerely Busway 10:10, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
additional notes Busway 10:42, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Who are you ? A Wikipedia administrator, certainly not !
Who gives you the right to erase our contributions ? You are not owner of this subject!
I am sorry but you cannot systematically reject our contributions ?
Your comments are not convincing ! respect us and you will respect yourself !
Is it necessary to utilize an administrator...to stop your schemes ?
Busway 13:13, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Hey! Why this article say there are only 6'6 million bulgarian speakers? I know, there are much turkish in bulgaria(10%) but they all know and lern bulgarian and turkish isn't a oficial lenguage of Bulgaria. So there are 8 million speakers in bulgarian and some 2 million abroad = 10-12 million total. See Bulgarian language
Perhaps we should replace the 'where spoken" column with "country of origin", as per Ethnologue. A person seeking information about official status of a particular language, will be able to find it on the specific page. It's also impossible to list significant communities accurately, and shifts the focus. Thoughts welcome. PioKuz4 17:36, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Weber sources (1997) http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/worldlang.htm
I have a distinction that might be useful. My native language, and the only language I speak fluently, is English, but people living in an area 150 North, or 150 south-west of my home often can't understand the way I speak when I'm at home. But if I make an effort (which will involve altering my pronunciation and thinking about my choice of names for things), my English can be understood by Canadians, anglophone South Africans, Scottish people, etc. So my question about Arabic is: Can a well-educated Morrocan and a well-educated Egyption have a detailed conversation in Arabic if they make an effort? Gronky 16:00, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
~Matveiko —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.194.72.10 ( talk) 20:15, 4 February 2007 (UTC).
I dont think Tamil, Kannada and Telugu should be so high in the list. The number of Hindi natives(considering India only) are far far more than native Tamil speakers. There are 15 states in India where Hindi is a native language. You just can't beat this fact. This is ridiculous and before writing one must look at the facts and get their sources straightened out. I think somebody is being a little more emotional about their native languages.
Would it not be an idea to add the following, as Wikipedia states their official status in various countries:- Bislama, Dhivehi, Dzongkha, Fijian, Frisian, Hiri Motu, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic, Latin, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Maori, New Zealand Sign Language, Romansh, Tetum, Venda and Welsh. All have less than a million speakers worldwide. Has anyone any thoughts? RAYMI —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.68.39.212 ( talk) 12:46, 6 February 2007 (UTC).
I can not stop laughing at the figures shown on this page in context to india. Population of Uttar Pradesh (state in India) is 180 million. Hindi is native tongue of not only this stae but atleast 3 other indian states with additional atleast 150 million population. Here on this page the figure for hindi is quoted as 170 or something. Infact they have removed Hindi from list breaking it into different dialects. Thats fancy. What linguist in the worldd regards Khariboli, Awadhi, Benarsi as diffrent language. Is Chinese just one language? Even the link quoted as refrence gives correct figure arond 330 million. Shame on you people, try to depict the world on wikipedia as it is, not what you would like to be.
The number you give(>400 mln)is very funny the right figure for native speakers is Egypt=80mln Turkey=1mln Iran=3mln Sudan=25mln Algeria=30mln Morocco=25mln Iraq=25mln KSA=22mln Yemen=22mln Syria=17mln Tunisia=11mln Libya=6mln Jordan=6mln Palestine(with refugees but excluding Jordan)=5mln Lebanon=4mln Kuwait=2mln Oman=2mln Mauritania=2mln UAE=1,5mln Qatar=0,5mln Bahrein=0,5mln Eriteria,Chad,Niger,Mali,Senegal=4mln Total "homeland"arabs=295mln Diaspora Arabs=5mln Total arabs(=arabic speakers)=300mln
I think that the english language is being slightly short handed in this article... Ok, if English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Belize, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Guyana, Isle of Man, Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, Nauru, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Ireland (Hiberno-English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom (various forms of British English), the U.S. Virgin Islands the United States (various forms of American English), and Zimbabwe.. then we should probably up the number of primary speakers of English by..... ALOT...... If the US is going on 300 million people, the united kingdom 60 million, australia 50 million... that passed the 400 million mark already and that's not including the other heap of countries that were just listed. I'm not saying that everyone in these countries only speak english or that it's their primary language, but the overwhelming majority of people in each one of these countries speak english as their main language..... And even if someone started with a particular language as a child, the goal is to identify their primary language, as in the most used and applied language to daily life. If you speak spanish to a handful of relatives, and speak english just as well to the rest of the world... I think it's safe to say that English is a primary language, or maybe a person could have 2 primary languages.... You can check wikipedia.com or other census verifying websites to any of the info I've displayed. Another intersting topic would probably be the influence of the enlgish language throughout the world and how english television, music, the internet, and other mediums greatly expand the engish language's territory.
-- Check your facts before disputing the wikipedia. You claim Australia as 50M people, but it is only 20M https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html Crispincowan 01:27, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
the number of Russian speakers is much higher due to the fact that in the soviet times there were 300M citizens and they were all educated in russian! another 100M + studied and were able to speak in this language. it is highly unreasonable to have just 145M first language speaker, we are talking about language and not ethnicity there are 143M russians in russia (and they all speak in russian) plus 20M russian speakers in Ukraine (all ukrainians know russian - 46M) and all the belarussians speak in russian (10M) millions of russian speakers as a first language in central Asia and so on... http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm test
add up your proposed figures and they're still well below the figure given in the article. the number of second language speakers for many languages do look low but that more indicates that the CIA/WA sources have strict standards of fluency to classify as a second language rather than any errors
Veridis 07:20, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
the 143M russians in russia include kids not yet able to speak & infants, also leave a margin for the dumb, unless its suggested that an year old russian baby is fluent in russian!!
1. French is indeed official in the new states I added. Before reverting, double-check things.
2. If we don't list territories, then we don't reflect the actual geographical spread of the language. New Caledonia is not metropolitan France. They are 11,000 miles apart!
3. The total number I give is not every who has studied French. The total number of people who have studied French at some point in their life is around 500 million (as of 2000), as explained here.
4. You wrote: "The article appears to be an attempt to make French look as important as possible rather than give a straight-forward account." That's a very weak argument sir. The University of Laval website is a very rigorous one, and actually I tend to find that they underestimate the number of Francophones in Africa.
5. Before reverting straight away genuine people contributing to the list, you'd rather check some of the very exagerated numbers already in the list. For instance, the list says that there are 101 million native speakers of German. Well, actually, there are tens of millions of people in Germany who are not native speakers of German. They are native speakers of dialects (Bavarian, Franconian, and so on). Yet they are listed as "native German speakers" here. Why don't you have anything to say about that?
On the other hand, the number of French speakers was ludicrously understimated in the list. Some people have already expressed negative comments about that in the talk page. You should read it. Hardouin 12:48, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Kwami, I'm sorry but your figure for French speakers is absolutely ridiculous. You simply take the 63 million French citizens and add to them the 4 million French-speaking Belgian citizens and you already have 67 million French speakers, which means more than the 65 million people mentionned on the page. Afterwards, you simply cannot consider there are no native French speakers neither in Switzerland, nor in Quebec, nor in the Middle East, nor in Africa. To sum it up, that 65 million French speakers figure is such a joke that absolutely no one can take it seriously. Metropolitan 00:39, 27 April 2006 (UTC).
My personal belief... I really think French Language is spoken by more than 100 million people around the world, but I really believe that this number could never reach 200 million. 264M seems to me quite exaggerated 500M?... Impossible. This is a simple question that could be included in the next census... "What is your native language?" It would solve many problems.
I note that although for French language some very strict measurement rules have been applied, the rules are much more lax for other languages. The Chinese government, for instance, estimates that only 90 million Chinese people really speak standard Mandarin, yet the article says that there are 872 million native speakers. That 872 million figure can only be reached if you add all native speakers of Sichuanese, Beijingnese, Shandongnese, Manchurian, Nanjingnese, etc., which are all very different dialects. Everyone who has been to China knows that someone from Xi'an cannot understand someone from Nanjing speaking in his/her native dialect. Yet all these people are counted as native speakers of "Mandarin" here.
Another example is German. In Germany about 10% of the population (8 million people) is not ethnically German. Furthermore, a vast proportion of the German population are native speakers of dialects (Bavarian, Franconian, Swabian, and so on), and they learn standard German at school. Yet the entire population of Germany was added up to reach the staggering figure of 121 million native speakers of standard German. Why?
So in a nutshell, in this list the native French speakers of Black Africa are not counted, but on the other hand the native Turkish spearkers of Germany are considered "native German" speakers. Sehr merkwürdig, nicht wahr? Hardouin 19:27, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Mutual comprehensibility is not the issue. I'm not really sure about Gallego - the basic issue is that it's closer to Portuguese than to Castilian, and Portuguese is always considered a separate language. In terms of German dialects, I can't present any specific evidence, but neither can you, and, indeed, you have not presented any evidence, just anecdotes and some suggestive vocabulary differences. I will suggest that the specific vocabulary differences you note do not necessarily make the differences between Swabian and standard German any greater than those between British and American English. For instance, I could give you...
And so forth. john k 20:42, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Of course I do not believe that German dialects are simply mere varieties of standard German. I'm just saying that giving a few examples of differing vocabulary are utterly useless. john k 03:53, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Concerning German, one ought to use their (German) common sense. While there are dialects, all speakers would regard themselves as German speaking since they are able to communicate with other Germans. Of course when some dialect speakers are talking quickly to each other, it will be hard for someone from another dialect to understand, but that's the case for English dialects too. I would take the challenge of understanding any dialect speaker, when he's speaking slowly and accentuated. You're obviously not a German, because the examples you listed are partly quite interchangeable (the words Griffel, Doktor, pressend are for example all valid German words, just less common than their synonyms and I suppose that the standard German words are also known and valid dialect words nowadays, just not in common usage. Swiss German shows some significant differences, but they are mostly in pronounciation (That's what my ears tell me at least). Agree with kwami. -- rubenarslan
I am sorry, but Galician and Catalan are not dialects of Castillian. Nowhere you will find such a stament as yours. Please, study linguistics before getting your hands into such a troublesome field. Bgdgz
Recent discussions re French have highlighted a general problem. If a person is completely bilingual (since infancy) which language is their first language? What do we do about black Africans who are bilingual in an African language and French or English or Portuguese? This also applies to Indians who are bilingual between Hindi (etc) and English, etc, etc.
My instinct is to say that there are zero Indians in India for whom English is their first language - ie millions of Indians are of course completely bilingual but they should all automatically be counted as Hindi-speakers not English. So, by the same instinct, I automatically assume the same for Africa. There are millions of Africans who speak English/French fluently but their first language "must" be the African one not English/French. Common sense.
BUT I accept that my instinct is not scientific in any way. The accepted way of deciding which is the first language is to ask which language is spoken at home. Within the context of Europe that means that bilingual members of linguistic minorities should always be included in the total of the minority language - ie every person in the Franch BasquCountry who is bilingual (since infancy) in Basque and French is automaticallly counted as first-language Basque not French. Every person in Wales who is bilingual (since infancy) in Welsh and English is automatically counted as first-language Welsh not English.
This principle seems correct to me in Europe but how does it apply to Africa, India, etc? Are there really any black African families in, say, Nigeria who are bilingual Hausa/English but choose to speak English at home? Hardouin, dicussing the former French colonies, has suggested that some black Africans do choose to use the European language at home. I must confess that I had never considered this possibility. Apart from anything else it seems unpatriotic of them to prefer the ex-colonial language. I had just assumed that, although they were completely bilingual, they would speak an African language within the home. However I am (of course) willing to be corrected on this point.
To summarise, it has always seemed to me to be common sense that ALL black Africans in black Africa must be included in the Hausa, Wolof,etc,etc totals and NONE in the English/French/Portuguese totals. But if it can be shown that some of them do indeed speak a European language at home then I was obviously wrong and we will have to change the Ethnolgue-derived totals to reflect that. Jameswilson 23:05, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
I think it is up to Hardouin to provide some evidence for a substantial number of Africans who speak French (or English, or whatever) in the home. Certainly Ethnologue provides no hint of this, and it's generally been our principal source for figuring out the numbers on this page. Note Ethnologue's listing for French (this doesn't include patois or dialects):
Algeria: 110,600 Andorra: 2,400 Belgium: 4,000,000 Benin: 16,700 Burundi: 2,200 Canada: 6,700,000 Central African Republic: 9,000 Chad: 3,000 Comoros: 1,700 Congo: 28,000 Côte d'Ivoire: 17,470 Djibouti: 15,440 French Polynesia: 25,668 Gabon: 37,500 Guadeloupe: 7,300 Haiti: 600 Lebanon: 16,600 Luxembourg: 13,100 Madagascar: 18,000 Mali: 9,000 Martinique: 9,000 Mauritius: 37,000 Mayotte: 2,450 Monaco: 17,400 New Caledonia: 53,400 Niger: 6,000 Réunion: 2,400 Rwanda: 2,300 Saint Pierre and Miquelon: 5,114 Seychelles: 977 Switzerland: 1,272,000 Togo: 3,000 Tunisia: 11,000 United Kingdom: 14,000 Vanuatu: 6,300 Wallis and Futuna: 120
That is to say - it gives small numbers of native speakers in most African countries, but clearly nowhere near a significant percentage of the population. It should be up to Hardouin to find some evidence which contradicts this. (It ought to be noted that in addition to this, we have several million speakers of French dialects in Europe, and several million speakers of French Creoles in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean) john k 04:24, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Naturally this article is affected by systemic bias. For ethnologue not to consider blacks or africans as native speakers of a european language is typical Systemic bias. Almost all countries in africa use a combination of local languages and European languages(principally french, english, and portuguese). In my home country of Zambia English is the official language, which means all official and government business is conducted in english. All newspapers and majority of television and radio shows are in English. The entire education system from primary school to university is in english. Essentially any who can read or write knows english. This obviously convienient as there almost 72 local dialects. That said Zambians are very proud of their local languages and almost every speaks or understands at least three languages by default- Bemba, Nyanja and English. Most Zambians will switch languages effortlessly depending on the situation eg when speaking to older people or people from rural areas one would use local languages, conversly when speaking with younger people or at work one would use english. I would best describe the use of english as a spectrum or some kind of uniform distribution. There is a small minority on one end who have completely no understanding of english and small minority of on the other end who use english exclusively. The majority in the middle have some ability to use both.
Back to systemic bias as I have digressed quite a bit. The belief in the west is that native speakers of english are only found in the US, UK, Canada and Australia(Basically white britons and british immigrants). Slowly these misconceptions are begining to change. The outsourcing of millions of jobs from the US and Europe to English speaking India is a case in point. In the next half century it is likely that there will be more french speakers in Africa than the rest of the world combined. This due to rising populations in francophone africa.
What do you think will happen in two or three generations time? Will English still be widely spoken in Zambia or will it have been replaced as the language of government and the media by a lingua franca based on an African language? As is happening gradually with Sango in the Central African Republic, for example. Jameswilson 22:42, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
-- Independence didn't necessarily lead to rejection of European languages. As mentioned earlier, There are more languages spoken in sub-saharan africa than any other region on the planet. When the european colonialists carved out africa, it was done with little regard to ethnic or linguistic boundaries. So in many countries there are several languages eg zambia has about 72, nigeria 250. To avoid potential conflicts that could arise if one local language was imposed upon the general population, English was selected as a unifying force.
However in Tanzania, English was rejected and Swahili was adopted as the official language. This was possible as Swahili had been used for thousands of years in East Africa, as a sort of intermediary language between local african tribes and also between africans and arab traders. Because Swahili was used as an intermediary language it is very adaptable to new and foreign linguistic concepts. It is much easier to translate more complex scientific or phylosophical concepts into Swahili than it would be into many other african languages. Non-swahili speaking africans also say swahili is easy to learn. Muntuwandi 03:06, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
And incidentally, the figure for second language KiSwahili speakers is far too low - effectively everyone in Kenya and Tanzania who has ever been to school has at least some Swahili, and large numbers of people in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, parts of Congo - my guess (& it is only a guess) would be 60-80 million. -- KenBrown 14:36, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Bye, folks. I'm leaving the grid for the next year. I've become the default (some would say self-appointed) maintainer of this article, but I won't be able to do this any longer. I'm hoping some of you out there in the wings will take over. This list could really go to seed if we don't keep on top of it -- basically just reverting the steady stream of unsubstantiated edits in populations and where spoken. kwami 17:23, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
As I stated some time ago, Turkish is currently not an official language in Bulgaria. After all, I am from Bulgaria, and I would have been the first to know if our constitution had been changed. Yes, I know it's listed as "regional" language on some sites, but this doesn't change the facts. I will repeat what I said before: a lot of people speak Turkish here (can't recall the exact percentage), but for now Bulgarian is the only official language. If you look at the Bulgaria page in Wikipedia, you'll see that it alsa says so. The Constitution of Bulgaria says so too. So let's keep the information in this article correct. -- Mégara (Мегъра) - D. Mavrov 20:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
I presume that "CIA" refers to the online CIA World Factbook. But I cannot find any statistics there that refer specifically to the number of native English speakers. On the other hand, I did find this reference for a number of native English speakers equalling 322 million. (Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999)). If some cannot give me a clear link to/reference for the figure of 308 million, I will replace it with the claim and reference I have. -- Susurrus 08:00, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
I say why not use calculations or estimates from The World Factbook (2006 Edition) to settle the dispute this page rages from time to time?. AshrafSS 17:19, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I've read this article but I've not found the source of all numbers of speakers. What is this article? A Wikipedia's research? A combination of differents sources? In this last case which was the discriminant to choose a number and not another? IMHO this is a "research" and this is an original reasearch, not verifiable, and this is also NPOV because Wikipedia has chosen statistics without indicating the parameters on this. For example, who choosed to merge Swiss German with Standard German? These are very different languages and in Swiss people speak Swiss Germ ( emmanisch) as 1st language and standard german as 2nd language (I live in Swiss)?
The interpretations are two (as I can believe because there is any preface to the list):
In this case I can believe this article "original" and "NPOV". The right approach should be the same as you can see in italian Wikipedia indicating different statistics ("this institute, this organization publishes this statistic not wikipedia") with comments. In this example Wikipedia takes no choose, indicates all points of view with references and comments as an NPOV article should be done, and we have a less number of flame.
At last I've had the opportunity to verify the En-Wikipedian censorship, Ok, fortunately there are some tools to control it. I've seen some proposal and an user who accept or not accept these: is this the correct approach for an wikipedian article? or this approach shows it that there is a (big!!!) problem on this article? -- Ilario 13:22, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Why are Cantonese and other languages included as part of Chinese when they are plainly different languages from Mandarin? ( Stpaul 11:30, 2 June 2006 (UTC))
It's a disputed fact whether Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects or Languages by themselves. However, it is generally accepted that they are dialects of the same language. (Chinese) I hope this helps a bit. Footballrocks41237 02:11, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Cantonese generally do not write what they say, when they write, they write in the language identical to what "Chinese"(I mean "Standard Spoken Chinese" speakers, i.e. so called "Mandarin" speakers) speak and write.
Something is clearly wrong. English should be #1 because 2 billion people speak it to some degree, where as 'Chinese' is a highly fragmented set of loosely related languages. By that criteria English again be on top because you'd have to add German, Dutch and the Scandanavian languages. Cameron Nedland 02:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
There is a highly fragmented set of loosely related Chinese languages, but the Chinese language, i.e. the Manadarin language, is one standardised language spoken throughout China and elsewhere. 129.12.200.49 14:31, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
Insert non-formatted text here
umm... I noticed it says on the page and some other pages that spanish is third (sometimes fourth) whilst english is fourth (sometimes third) yet most pages on the internet and some books put it at either number two or three. Are the internet sites and books misguided, if not can someone fix it. I would but I can't really be bothered.
here are some links I found: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html (-this one refers to ethnologue too) http://www.linguasphere.org/language.html http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0724-unesco.html
p.s. and the numbers on the page don't add up if u tally up the populations of the nations mentioned(AND counting india at about 300 million etc.) some one should really fix, I would but I can't be bothered.
(UTC)
Why is Latin listed while, for example, Icelandic (another official state language, but with more speakers) isn't?
Do we really have to use a separate table for Chinese & Hindi? It looks broken and confused me before I saw the note in the page source. Moskvax 01:16, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
According to the 2002 Republic of Ireland census, 1.6 million there can speak Irish, while 165,000 can speak it in Northern Ireland and 25,000 use it regulary in the USA. Should it be on the table?
WARNING, I removed a racist insult probably written by the racists of Italian Northern League under the voice "Zulu". You probably didn't understand: Italian racists use the world "zulu" in the meaning of savage or ignorant. Meaning this, the writer added that "zulu" was spoken in Sicily (which isn't) and included "other terronian lands". The word "terrone" is an insult based over the Italian word "terra" (land) given by racists of northern league to southerners of Italy, who were, in ancient times, mainly peasants. Nowadays, of course, southern Italy is more cultured and advanced of north, having a very higher rate of graduated then north. PLEASE, identify the author of this racist insult. Val
I didn't understand why portuguese is ranked 7th. Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay, are different languages, can't be counted as one. And Arabic are not mutually intelligible. I propose portuguese must be ranked as 5th, once we are counting native speakers only. If Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay can be summed why not sum Portuguese with Spanish, they are completely mutually intelligible.
Look at this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_distribution_of_Portuguese there if we calculate the values, we will obtain a number greater than the one showed on the rank (we will obtain 230 million). And I still haven't seen all the varieties of Arabic separte. I hope this update could be done pretty soon. See ya.
This is a complete insane list concerning Portuguese.... Only in Brazil we have around 187 millions native speakers + around 11 millions in Portugal, we get 198 million, only in this two countries! A number very different than 174 millions.
I understand that we are only by popular concept and not by mutual intelligibiliy. I just did a comparison in the previous scrap. Just to point out that Indonesian and Malay cannot be summed.
Another thing to point out is that Indonesian is just second language in Indonesia, coexisting wiht Javanese and many other distinct languages. And the people of East Timor do not speak Indonesia primarilly, in East Timor around 15% speaks Portuguese and the other 85% speaks Tetum.
Well as you said you already have the corrections in your hands, I hope we can see it posted in Wikipedia pretty soon.
Thank You!!!
Shouldn't Indonesian be at number six? Between Arabic and Portuguese? 203.118.32.120 07:33, 1 December 2006 (UTC)Tiddysmith 1/12/06
The numerics for English have been totally under-estimated. If you add the population of the United States and the United Kingdom alone you're 50 mil over the total estimate. Not to mention the other countries of the Commonwealth of Nations which all exclusively use English.
I'll attempt to add them up and get a figure based on each countries wiki entry. It's no one has picked up on this before. Jachin 08:30, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
You must not sum simply all the population account. If you do that the list will became inaccurate. And.... every in India speaking English, you´re joking you know! With more than 600 Millions of its population living below the poverty line, and considering the fact that Hindi and English are completely different in grammar structure, alphabet and phonology you´re out of your mind. And just to finish... This list is only for NATIVE SPEAKERS, not every that has a contact with English. I don't know how many languages do you speak, but I can assure you that the second language you speak, you're not completely able to understand and express yourself without a paraphrasis, or stop to think how you must say something. (Unless, you borned bilingual). For sure English is the most important language in world nowaday, but not every is native to it, and are fully capable to express itself like an American or English does. And I really believe that PERHAPS, the number of second language speakers must be wrong, but definitilly the number of first language usage is correct (for the year that are referenced in). Robledo
I agree in charge with you Pedro, but try looking the wikipedia in Portuguese, I made the portuguese version and correct some mistakes of the version in English, but I'm still finishing it and looking for all kind of sources. That's I removed all the references, but I'll put it again later. Robledo
The article for Languages in the United States and the CIA world factbook linked below both state that 82% of the population of the United states (300 million as of 2006) speak english natively. This gives a total of 246 million native speakers of english in the US alone. if this ranking article is correct then the entire native english speaking population of the US (246 million) plus the united kingdom (60 million total population - minus about 25% of the total population of wales of 3 million or 0.75 million for 59.25 million english speakers) plus Canada (33 million population total 60% english for 20 million) plus Australia (20 million total 80% english for 16 million) gives a total of 341 million native english speakers allowing a population of only *negative* 33 million speakers in *all* other native english speaking populations in the world (308 million(article total) minus 341 million (english speaking total for US + UK + Canada + australia)). How can there be such a large negative population of english speakers in all of the other countries?
Here are the links to pages that back up the populations and percentages given for:
The USA: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
The United Kingdom: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html
Canada: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ca.html
Australia: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html
using the language percentages and total populations from those links makes the 308 million native english speaker total simply impossible.
If no links can be shown to back up the 308 million total in a way that addresses the existing native speaker totals for *at least* those 4 countries (341 million) then I will change the article to the totals for those 4 countries rather than the absurd 308 million figure currently shown. Granted my total of 341 million native speakers ignores millions of native english speakers in all other countries but it would still be a dramatic improvment over the existing figure.
I completely agree about the UK figure but take note that the existing figure cites "cia" (presumably world factbook) as its source and if you look at the Uk entry in the CIa world factbook you will find that for language breakdown it only lits 25% of the population of wales as the non native english speaking population. I am simply using the reference cited in the article. Also take note that the entries for the other 3 countries in the cia world factbook are far less ambiguous simply stating the percentage of the total population that are native speakers of english.
Reviewing the discussion so far I see this number (308 million) has been questioned for some time already. I am going to go ahead and change it to the modest minimum total of 341 million I determined now. It is probably still too low but it is an obvious improvement over the existing figure.
HEY, WE HAVE A PARCIAL ACCOUNT HERE. THE 308MILLIONS IS FOR 2004 AND NOT FOR 2006. IF WE ARE TO UPDATE THE NUMBER, WE MUST UPDATE SPANISH AS WELL. AND TELL ME SOMETHING, WHY ENGLISH MUST BE AT THE TOP ALWAYS? YOU SIMPLY DON'T LIKE TO BE OVERPASSED BY ANYONE ELSE??? WHAT'S THE MATTER, WE ARE NOT THE BEST IN EVERYTHING!!!
Why don't you take a look at this same article in Portuguese.... The number seems quite the same you did.
What on Earth? now the article reports 425 million native speakers of english. Even assuming that every single inhabitant of the US, the UK, Australia and Canada were native english speakers I don't think the total would approach such a number. The rest of the countries (ireland, new zealand, south africa, etc) certainly don't have the population to make up the difference. Does any know where the 425 million native speakers figure comes from? Are there several million Indians who learn english as a first language or something?
Zebulin 16:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I've disputed the acuracy of this article because it refers numerous times to a mysterious CIA document from 2004 without any further details. If someone knows what this document is, please cite the details correctly. If this document is the CIA world factbook, I'm not sure that we should use it; it is very unclear what they mean by counting someone as speaking a language. It is not at all obvious if they mean as his or her main daily language or first language or some type of fluency level or what. If we can't find a better source I think we should revert everything to the numbers from Ethnologue. It would be a shame to use so much 1984 data, though and it seems that the number of English speakers is something of a contetious issue. The Ethnologue puts this at 309 million [3] (using data from various times between 1970 and 2004). I don't think people would stand for that, but there is little point in just guessing numbers out of thin air. I think that the Ethnologue is the most widely respected source and may be as accurate as we can get, but if people think it is out of date there is a vaguely accademic article from 2001 here comparing a number of sources. This may serve as a jumping off point to find a more satisfactory sum. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cwlq ( talk • contribs) .
Hungarian, Polish and German (not Yiddish) are all spoken in Israel, and i know some people who speak each of them. They are alive and well and not necessarily very old. There are daily newspapers in Hungarian and German and maybe Polish too. Ethnologue supports that.
I haven't met any Ukrainian speakers in Israel personally. All those who came to Israel from Ukraine spoke Russian. Ethnologue doesn't list Israel as a country where Ukrainian is spoken, however i am not erasing Israel from the list, because first of all, some children who learned Ukrainian in school in the 90's may prefer it to Russian and secondly, a local satellite TV provider started showing a Ukrainian channel lately. So maybe there is truth to that claim. -- Amir E. Aharoni 07:23, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
If Spanish and Hindi have 390M and 370M native speakers respectively, why is Hindi above Spanish? Similarly why is Bengali (171M) above Arabic (206M) and French (120M) above Japanese (127M), etc? Lfh 14:22, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
I was just going to say the same. I think that since there is over 300 million people in the Arab world, so 206M is definately too small. I don't know how to edit the template, though.-- Fox Mccloud 14:37, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
People, Arabic is a ethinicity, but they are different languages. The Arabic spoken in the Lebanoon, is not comprehensible in the Argelia. It would the same as we sum all latin people, then we would have Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian and Spanish altogether.... I think we should make distinctions in this case, we must put Maghreb Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Egyptian Arabic. Otherwise, we must put together, Portuguese-Spanish, Indonesian-Malay, Norsk-Swedish-Danish, this languages are almost the same with little variation while Arabic is not.Robledo
Ifeldman84: I really don't know anyone personally anyone who speaks Ukrainian, but i didn't delete your edit - just marked it with {{fact}}. Most of the information in this article is based on Ethnologue and it doesn't say that anyone speaks Ukrainian in Israel. If you can prove that anyone does, you are welcome to send me your source for that.
Please stop changing the article without any proof. -- Amir E. Aharoni 05:14, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
I notice Hindi and Urdu have two seperate entries. However, they are widely considered to be two terms for the same language (albeit implying differences in the script used to write the language). Should they not have one entry? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.12.200.49 ( talk • contribs) 14:26, 29 September 2006.
The issues mentioned above mix up several categories, such as socio-linguistics, grammar, vocabulary etc. And there is of course the political and socio-political (including religious) angle, which played and plays a major role in the formation of what is today modern Hindi in the Nagari script and a Sanskritised vocabulary. But such blurring of categories is nothing unusual in the discourse on Hindi/Urdu, so maybe one should be pragmatic and stick to the official categorisations in South Asia. — However, there is another problem, namely that of the so-called "varieties" and "dialects" of Hindi. As anyone conversant with the problematics of defining "language" and "dialect" knows, these classifications are often arbitrary, and this is, in the case of Hindi, now even so in official usage in India, where Maithili is now a Schedule Eight language, and Bhojpuri is bound to follow in a few years' time. This incongruity has not gone unnoticed even in the Indian parliament, where an MP tried to make a distinction between "bhasha" and "boli" to nevertheless subsume Maithili under Hindi even though it is now officially a separate language (as it always was to the Sahitya Akademi, as well as various universities in Bihar and Nepal). Some of today's "dialects" or "varieties" of Hindi were actually the literary languages in use in northern India before Khari Boli (e.g. Braj, Awadhi, Maithili), and are in part still used in such a function independently of Khari Boli. One could go on an on about this issue, but these example should suffice. From which it follows that there is clearly a lot to be thought about in the context of "Hindi". Anuragi 08:29, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Hm here's a bigger problem. The Hindi estimate is based on a 1991 census estimate seeing as thats 17 years ago, and India has surpassed a billion people I think that there are quite a bit more than that, I think we need an update. I'm Bengali and I can definitely say that there is no way that there are more Bengali speakers than "Hindi" speakers. I am confused though, are these numbers based on Native speakers or on population in the country? Because English in particular is acquired a lot, which is why it's such a common global connection. Encyclopedia5988 23:42, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I think some sort of clarification of how this magical 480 million number is achieved. India has a population of about 1.1 billion. I'm unsure how many non-resident Hindi speakers speak Hindi as a first language especially beyond first generation. For example, Kenyans of Indian origin speak Hindi but their native language/first language tends to be Swahili especially beyond first generation of immigration.
However, considering the populous non-Hindi-speaking Southern, Northern, Eastern and Western states in India, and the few Central states that partially speak Urdu (which I'm considering to be a distinct language as it is unintelligible to Hindi speakers in written or formal oral form), it astonishes me that still half of the country is supposed to be native Hindi speakers. Plus if one considers ethonologue report from 1998, Hindi was rated much lower in terms of population. Has Hindi population really doubled in 8 years? It's a little dubious. I smell a little bit of exaggeration for nationalistic reasons (as someone mentioned above) although I could be wrong of course :). Could someone shed some light on this?
Thanks you.
64.194.250.99 19:12, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I can let you know how this figure should have been higher. Population of Uttar Pradesh - 180 million , erstwhile Bihar 120 miilion , Madhya Pradesh - 90 Million , Rajasthan - 80 million , Delhi - 12 million and smatterings of Hindi speaking people all over the country e.g Mumbai at least 30% of 15 million = 5 million speak hindi as first language. Hindi as I believe in sheer numerical terms should be 2nd most populous language. Someone said Urdu being not intelligible to hindi people that is like saying US people do not understand UK english because it has a nasle twang to it.
Thanks
According to the articles Pashto and Pashtun people, the number of Pashto-speakers is ca. 40m (35m being the lowest assumption, while 45m being the highest). This should be updated in this article which still states that Pashto has only 27m native speakers.
Tājik 20:10, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Presumably there are many people in Afghanistan (and perhaps in Pakistan as well) who speak Pashto without it being their native language. john k 03:47, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Can we make the numbers a little more concrete? How about using this. - Peregrinefisher 17:56, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Should ASL be considered in the list? although not a traditional language it does have 20mil 'speakers'.
and cite sources for every bit of information here. It is a nightmare to fix this article if there is constant fiddling with numbers without comment or attribution. Edits such as this one, apparently made from some sort of gut conviction rather than a specific source, should be reverted on sight. dab (ᛏ) 11:09, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
SIL has:
Hindi estimates fluctuate particularly, placing Hindi/Urdu anywhere between 2nd and 5th place. dab (ᛏ) 11:18, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
vasque or euskera is spoken in the Vasque Country and Navarra in the north of Spain, I don't know exactly the number of native speakers but it is an important lenguge in Spain.
As for Maninka language the order given is wrong. The article did not account for Maninka, Jula or Bamanankan speakers in Burkina Faso, in Ivory Coast and even in Gambia. I would like to take this remark into consideration.
The second remark is, in the classification, you seperated the Maninka and the Bambara, though they make the same language Mandekan. Assuming Maninka, Bamanankan and Jula are varieties of the same language, Bamanankan has 2.8 million native speakers plus 10 million second language speakers, making 13 million plus 3.3 million accounted for Maninka and all its varities would be estimated to 16.3 million. Accordingly, kindly take this fact into account when editing the page next time, speakers of Jula in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast are not still not accounted for.
A great misleading shows that some trying to show that there are lot of English Speakers in world. It is very blunder. And misleading. Please correct It. English native speakers are very less. We can see English speaking people in Metro cities of India. But it is negligible when it compare to Hindi. It is same case of HongKong . Even world famous actor Jackie Chan don't know English well known. Selavaraj 09:23, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I imagine it is a negligible amount, but Navajo may be worth investigation to be added to the list of endangered languages. Though the population of the American reservation is only 300,000, it IS an official language, and there has been a concerted effort on the part of the population to teach it to children and incorporate it in a primarily english speaking environment. just offering it for consideration. Nastynorth 10:20, 25 December 2006 (UTC)—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nastynorth ( talk • contribs) 10:19, 25 December 2006 (UTC).
There's a problem with multiple sources here, and some people doing their own calculations. OK, I admit it, I've done that (with discussion) for Arabic, as the ethnologue figure did seem clearly too low. But for this list the same source should be used for all the languages. My question is, which one? The ethnologue is the most widely used language reference, so that would be the default, but not the only choice. CIA doesn't seem to always cover the issue consistently. The other lists don't seem to go lower than the top 13 or so, so could not be used for consistency. SO I'd propose using the ethnolgue figures, imperfect as they are. Or you could have differnet lists, according to XXX...
Your opinions please! -- Drmaik 21:29, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
Number | Ethnologue | CIA | etc. |
---|---|---|---|
1 |
Chinese, Mandarin xy.z million speakers |
Chinese, Mandarin xz.y million speakers |
etc. |
Obviously, that would need some work, but that would be the theory. Sectori 00:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
After having read many of the discussions on this page, I would agree that the only way to make this page valuable would be to compile a table as suggested here. Preferably with a short description on how the data was compiled by the agencies in the list. I'm rather unexperienced with wikipedia, but maybe a vote on this issue could be called? User:manfalk
What about Indonesian language? How come it is not listed here? Though the external link says it is on ranking number 8 or 9? 84.44.224.140 15:11, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
What about eg Cantonese (71m+ speakers). This link gives a lot more detail: http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/may/SinoTibetanLanguageFamily.htm. Also, should Urdu (Pakistan) not be included in the Hindi section? 81.6.227.76 10:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
This page is very inconsistent in dealing with Chinese languages. Obviously, this page tries to distinguish Mandarin with other Chinese languages/dialects (Cantonese, Wu, Min, etc.), but it overlooks the basic fact: even if you count Cantonese etc. as separate languages, native speakers of these languages in China usually speak Mandarin as good as a native Mandarin speaker, or at least, understand it well while listening or reading. They should at least be considered to speak Mandarin as a second language. Therefore, the speaker of Mandarin should be around 1.2 billion, rather than the 800 million listed here. Moreover, if you wanna count Cantonese, Wu etc. as separate languages, where are they in this table? Wu has native speaker of about 100M, while Cantonese added another 80~90M, both should be in top 25, but both are not listed.
I took out Namibia as a country where German is spoken officially because since 1990 it has lost that status, putting it instead as an area where significant communities do indeed speak it. BTW, I do believe that this page would portray more interesting and relevant information if we changed it to encompass only individual, mutually intelligible languages, thus for example having only Mandarin on top (instead of all the chinese languages summed up together). The same applies to Arabic. Cheers Pedrassi 10:29, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
In fact, I think I'll do that now. Pedrassi 10:29, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm taking out Eritrea as a country where Italian is officially spoken because the country doesn't have any official language. English and Arabic(together with other local ones) are generally used as working languages there. In fact, Italian seems to be pretty much dead in Africa (it has just about disappeared from Somalia as well). Pedrassi 20:52, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
What happened to arabic? Even if there are dialecs, 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
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
Is there a reason why arabic isnt on the list anymore? just something I noticed. -- The Fear 01:18, 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 [6], 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)
Note : It is always difficult to calculate the number of real French-speaking people in the world, because many people in Africa and North Africa, for example, usually speak, all the time, French and are not counted like native French-speaking people.
Don't rebot, please, I move again for a good comprehension.
sincerely Busway 10:10, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
additional notes Busway 10:42, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Who are you ? A Wikipedia administrator, certainly not !
Who gives you the right to erase our contributions ? You are not owner of this subject!
I am sorry but you cannot systematically reject our contributions ?
Your comments are not convincing ! respect us and you will respect yourself !
Is it necessary to utilize an administrator...to stop your schemes ?
Busway 13:13, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Hey! Why this article say there are only 6'6 million bulgarian speakers? I know, there are much turkish in bulgaria(10%) but they all know and lern bulgarian and turkish isn't a oficial lenguage of Bulgaria. So there are 8 million speakers in bulgarian and some 2 million abroad = 10-12 million total. See Bulgarian language
Perhaps we should replace the 'where spoken" column with "country of origin", as per Ethnologue. A person seeking information about official status of a particular language, will be able to find it on the specific page. It's also impossible to list significant communities accurately, and shifts the focus. Thoughts welcome. PioKuz4 17:36, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
Weber sources (1997) http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/worldlang.htm
I have a distinction that might be useful. My native language, and the only language I speak fluently, is English, but people living in an area 150 North, or 150 south-west of my home often can't understand the way I speak when I'm at home. But if I make an effort (which will involve altering my pronunciation and thinking about my choice of names for things), my English can be understood by Canadians, anglophone South Africans, Scottish people, etc. So my question about Arabic is: Can a well-educated Morrocan and a well-educated Egyption have a detailed conversation in Arabic if they make an effort? Gronky 16:00, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
~Matveiko —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.194.72.10 ( talk) 20:15, 4 February 2007 (UTC).
I dont think Tamil, Kannada and Telugu should be so high in the list. The number of Hindi natives(considering India only) are far far more than native Tamil speakers. There are 15 states in India where Hindi is a native language. You just can't beat this fact. This is ridiculous and before writing one must look at the facts and get their sources straightened out. I think somebody is being a little more emotional about their native languages.
Would it not be an idea to add the following, as Wikipedia states their official status in various countries:- Bislama, Dhivehi, Dzongkha, Fijian, Frisian, Hiri Motu, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic, Latin, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Maori, New Zealand Sign Language, Romansh, Tetum, Venda and Welsh. All have less than a million speakers worldwide. Has anyone any thoughts? RAYMI —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.68.39.212 ( talk) 12:46, 6 February 2007 (UTC).
I can not stop laughing at the figures shown on this page in context to india. Population of Uttar Pradesh (state in India) is 180 million. Hindi is native tongue of not only this stae but atleast 3 other indian states with additional atleast 150 million population. Here on this page the figure for hindi is quoted as 170 or something. Infact they have removed Hindi from list breaking it into different dialects. Thats fancy. What linguist in the worldd regards Khariboli, Awadhi, Benarsi as diffrent language. Is Chinese just one language? Even the link quoted as refrence gives correct figure arond 330 million. Shame on you people, try to depict the world on wikipedia as it is, not what you would like to be.