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Archive 1 |
I've looked at this page's sources and I cannot figure out where, for example, they get an estimate for "Chinese" of 1.4 billion speakers. It's not in any of the three sources. In fact even George Weber's high-extreme estimate for Chinese is only 1.2 billion, although that was admittedly over fifteen years ago. I am going to rewrite the figures on this page using only the figures from Ethnologue, because both other sources appear to be at least ten years out of date. I'm also removing the high-extreme figures because they cover native speakers, not total speakers. Khin2718 ( talk) 18:40, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
250 or 350 Million? -- 84.113.52.244 ( talk) 08:32, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
According to the articles referenced, it is 250 million, which indicates we should revert back to that. It seems that we spend more time on reverting vandalism that getting the facts straight. But is this an article just about George Weber's estimate, or on the actual number? We really need a range of numbers based on a range of references, otherwise this becomes either a wikipediaization of one person's research, or a platform for why my language should higher figures/is more important. OrhanCharles 03:53, 28 May 2010 (UTC) —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
OrhanCharles (
talk •
contribs)
Don't ya guys think this is too specific? It's not really even a list! It just says: "This is just an estimation!"! I was looking for a way more informative and more 'up-to-date' info. Didn't this come from 1997? What happend to the 21st century?- 6/10/2010, 6:43pm (Central) (Don't you dare, SineBot, sign my IP!!)
(Same Person as last time) WAKE UP WIKIPEDIA! I'm starting to think you guys are stupid! All ya guys care about is the "Most Important" ones. You guy didn't even fix the YOG 2010 (Search Singapore 2010 and you'll find it.) articles, let alone the USA team. I'm gonna stop using Wiki for a moment. Bye! :( —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.170.216.184 ( talk) 12:48, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
I know it's been discussed for multiple languages above but the numbers here and in List of languages by number of native speakers differ radically. There are more native speakers than total speakers for at least one language (Hindi/Urdu). Ethnologue is cited as the primary source for both, but Hindi/Urdu cites another, probably less reliable source (BBC language lessons).
Without some standard to reconcile widely differing sources, these articles make no sense. I don't have inclination to sort this out but IMO both articles are dubious as-is. Feel free to either provide better footnotes on what's what or fix the numbers, then delete the dubious template i added. - PhilipR ( talk) 13:57, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Something is wrong in those numbers. For example:
Number of portuguese native speakers: 220 million
Number of portuguese secondary speakers: 28 million
Total number of native and secondary speakers of portuguese: 188 million
So 220+28=188 ??????????????
French: 75+190 = 270 ???-- viriatus ( talk) 15:18, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Language counts are so far far out of date here, they should not even be given at all. English and Spanish are both wrong. America has 300 million population, and you only have the whole english language speakers as not much more than that. They must both be at least 400 million now or more. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.13.168.139 ( talk) 06:01, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
might it be suitable to acknowledge other common estimates? it would only be fair to allow any wellsourced reference... as noted in numerous cases above, there are many counts that are not necessarily any more or less accurate, but are nonetheless left out. common things I might like to see:
--— robbie page talk 21:07, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
REally, that make no sense since Brazil has 193 million population and portugal has 11 million. it would be 202 million using portuguese as first language. If we add angola, mozambique, timor and the other portuguese colonies, we get a number around 250 million. it is the true.
201.78.165.232 ( talk) 17:17, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
Hi there the link which is used as reference says "Population 46,300,000 in Turkey (1987). Population total all countries: 50,733,420."
http://www.ethnologue.com/language/tur
Are you serious about using this link as reference?We are in 2013!Please update this page and use the current references.-- 78.189.170.134 ( talk) 09:18, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
There is an obvious mistake in the Weber's estimate table
. Spanish 395 mill. 20 mill. 3375 mill.
I am not sure what the correct number is (415 mill?) but it's definitely not 3,3 billion — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.242.76.246 ( talk) 14:40, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Somehow, according to the table containing Weber's estimates, 365 million native English speakers plus 150 million second language speakers equals 480 million total speakers. If the native and second language speaker estimates are to be believed, the actual total speaker figure should be 515 million.
The link to reference 36 does not ultimately lead to the referenced source.
MJVEDLMA ( talk) 00:32, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Where is the language data of the 2011 India census? I thoroughly checked the Internet and found nothing but "not yet published" !-- Loup Solitaire 81 ( talk) 17:52, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Someone pointed me towards Telugu being in the Ethnologue table twice. I'm not sure if one was a mistake, or a test-edit, or a newer citation. No time to dig through the history, so noting it here. HTH. Quiddity ( talk) 18:02, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Re L2 speakers of German, "80 million in Germany (no date)" - is that the figure for the total L1 plus L2? Similar issue for Bengali: "166 million in Bangladesh and 90 million in India (2011 Census)" seems to refer to total speakers. -- Chriswaterguy talk 13:27, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
Those estimations are ridiculous. 700 million of French speakers? The credibility of wiki is zero. There are around 125 million speakers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.236.227.138 ( talk) 02:09, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
If it was written 700 millions speakers for french before, it is totally ridiculous... The new number of 74 millions speakers is laughable in the other sense... There are neither 700 millions nor are they only 75 millions native french speakers. One number is ridiculously high, the other ridiculously low. The sources vary as too how many people exactly speak french as a mothertongue, due to the complexity of having exact numbers from reliable sources in the whole world. I guess the most reasonable estimations vary between 220 millions (german source) and 265 millions (italian source). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.14.227.246 ( talk) 01:21, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
Persian Langues has 110 million people but is not in here! why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Qian.neewan ( talk • contribs) 08:47, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Is there any reason not to delete the KyrssTal estimates? They're self-published without any sources, and neither of the website's proprietors ( Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi) seems to be any sort of linguistic or demographic scholar. — Neil 22:29, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
I disagree with kwami edits to remove Statista. The Ethnologue website is also eCommerce website https://www.ethnologue.com/cart selling language articles and maps. PradeepBoston ( talk) 21:06, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
I do not agree with your AFAICT. Statista is Statistical reference used by Wall Street Journal and other news sites. "Statista is a reliable and comprehensive source for The Wall Street Journal - Jason Bellini, Editor, The Wall Street Journal" PradeepBoston ( talk) 22:36, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. More data is better as everyone has POV. It is hard to define language boundaries. PradeepBoston ( talk) 20:09, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
There's a fairly clear consensus to merge.— Neil P. Quinn ( talk) 04:02, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
Both these pages cover very similar ground. On the total speakers page, both the Ethnologue and Weber estimates separate out native, second language, and total speakers, and using sortable tables means that the list can work for all three.
The native speakers page only includes one estimate, from Nationalencyklopedin. Adding it to the total speakers page, and then renaming that page "list of languages by number of speakers" would consolidate everything nicely. — Neil P. Quinn ( talk) 06:33, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
No issues. Please go ahead. PradeepBoston ( talk) 19:01, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Per " talk:list of languages by number of native speakers#Merge completed" and " talk:list of languages by number of speakers#merge," the merge between this page and " list of languages by number of native speakers" did not work out and the pages have been unmerged again. Should the merge-discussion notification on this page be removed then? Nicole Sharp ( talk) 21:46, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
Just FYI, but I took the time to compile the data from " list of languages by number of native speakers," " list of languages by total number of speakers," and each individual language's Wikipedia page to create this list: " user:Nicole Sharp/languages by population." Since it combines multiple sources and multiple dates from across Wikipedia, not sure if it is proper to copy into the Wikipedia article here, but feel free to use it if you like. Nicole Sharp ( talk) 21:27, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
The Thai numbers are way off. There are about 63 million people living in Thailand, and it is the only official language there, well over 90 % should speak it. Thai_Language lists 60 - 65 million speakers. The figure on this page seem to be from 1990... I bet other languages have the same problem. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.226.97.7 ( talk) 21:29, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
References
This article based on data from a Christian missionary website is a total nonsense.-- Professional Assassin ( talk) 21:36, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
Why? they have a vested interest in knowing how to allocated their missionary resources. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.180.45.209 ( talk) 23:43, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
Why does the table is sorted by invisible values? Why was the Russian, with 166 proven speakers, ranked higher than Portuguese with 200M speakers? If no exact total values are known, sorting should be done by L1 column. Not by alleged total value. And this proven (not alleged) sum should be listed in "Total' column. That would be fair! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Suncatcher 13 ( talk • contribs) 16:57, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
The list says that there are 55 million L2 speakers of German in Germany, which amounts to 2/3 of the country’s total population. However I am sure that at least 90% of German speakers in Germany are L1 speakers, so this figure can’t be true. Milton Alan Turner of Saint Ignatius Highschool, Cleveland reports 9 million German L2 speakers altogether, which seems much more realistic. LiliCharlie ( talk) 19:56, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
The list by native speakers says that over 140 million Indonesians speak Indonesian as a second language, in addition to the 20 million or so who speak it natively. Furthermore, the population of Indonesia itself is over 230 million (4th most populous nation in the world), and the official language of the nation is Indonesian.
I don't know if there are any sources regarding the actual number of Indonesian speakers in Indonesia, but i'm sure they would make the list. I only care because I happen to be one of those speakers of Indonesian as a second language (though I'm American). Chas ( talk) 18:10, 24 December 2009 (UTC)
Linguistically speaking, Indonesian is a dialect; it's mutually intelligible with other dialects of Malay, such as Bahasa Malaysia. This is backed up by the wikipedia article "Malay Language."
Wikipedia contradicts itself when the Malay article claims 180mil total speakers based on ethnologue without listing it up there with Bengali in this list. This point remains if you disregard Malay and consider just the Wikipedia 'Indonesian Language' article which cites ethnologue for 165 million. I'd edit it, but my changes always get reversed, I've given up.
Having had some exposure to both Malaysian and Indonesian, they are indeed very similar but only barely mutually intelligible. They are in the same sense that a German speaker listening very carefully to a Dutch speaker may be able to understand with a bit of work. It is, therefor, fallacious to list them as the same language. 67.168.203.190 ( talk) 01:00, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
I support the frustration of other users... The population of Indonesia is in excess of 250 million and for the past 50 years Bahasa Indonesia has been the sole language of education, government and media across the country, with literacy rates well above 90% it is simply ludicrous to say that so few people speak Malayu/Indonesian as listed by ethnologue. On top of this Malayu/indonesian is the lingua franca of Borneo and malaysia and one of the primary languages of Singapore. Varients of malayu are spoken across southern Micronesia, Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines. 300 million total speakers would be a conservative estimate making it one of the top global languages. Somehow it appears this does not fit our global paradigm...
As for comments that Malay and Indonesian are not interchangable or far from similar, please explain that to the millions of Indonesian's who watch Malay movies and sitcoms every day and vice versa. On seperate occasions I have travelled through each countries with native speakers from the other country on their first trips to their neighbouring nation. At no stage did either have trouble communicating fluently carrying on detailed discussions in a language in a country they had never been to before. I myself though fluent in Indonesian as a second language find I can chat extensively with malaysians, understanding at least 85%-90% of all words and easily guessing the meaning through clear word association for most of the rest. Bigyabbie ( talk) 08:24, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
This
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This article should be semi-protected as it has been vandalized everyday for a very longtime now.
70.51.84.138 (
talk)
15:04, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
Is there an article on Wikipedia that looks at the historical change of the sorts of data shown in this list?
Say 1800, 1900, 1950, 1970, 1980, and so forth?
It would be encyclopedic, and interesting to our global readership, if any data sources are available.
Cheers. N2e ( talk) 17:53, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
I have seen this statement repeatedly on Wikipedia: "Urdu is mutually intelligible to Hindi." It appears on several pages, but I don't think any of them are cited. What basis do we have for this? Urdu and Hindi have differences, which cause them not to fit the definition of "mutual intelligibility." To what extent of similarity between two languages does there have to be before Wikipedia considers it mutually intelligible. I think we at least need a qualifier here to note the differences. Abierma3 ( talk) 04:49, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
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How can there be 78 million first language speakers when there are already 83 million people in Germany, plus Austria, parts of Switzerland and Belgium? I know they speak strange dialects but still they're supposed to be German-speaking... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.174.247.217 ( talk) 00:35, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
About 90% is the 82 million people in Germany speak German as their first language https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/180022/umfrage/deutsch-als-muttersprache-in-der-familie/
That would be 73.8 million. I guess the numbers are similar for the 9 million people in Austria. MartinThoma ( talk) 20:44, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
Why is this included under Arabic as a 'variant'? It is an independent language. This classification is ignorant at best, though probably illegal. Wikipedia, wake up and hire some decent linguists. Relying on crappy professors and students with too much time on their hands has done you no favours. 193.188.33.23 ( talk) 14:29, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
How is it illegal? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.243.253.117 ( talk) 10:28, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
Linguistically, Maltese is a dialect of Arabic, descended from the otherwise extinct Sicilian Arabic dialect. So, if all dialects(some not mutually intellegible) of Arabic (not just the standard form) are supposed to be included, you might include Maltese. Maltese does use a different script than Standard Arabic, but , after all, Hindi and Urdu are counted as one single language, even though Hindi uses Devanagari script while Urdu uses Arabic script. Quanstizium ( talk) 21:37, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
According to The Telegraph article, Mapped: Where to go if you can't be bothered to learn the language, I've calculated the number of English speakers at far more than 1,387,530,865. How is this "Ethnologue's" figure so far off this mark?
Nation | Population | English Speaking % | Total English Speakers |
United States | 324,459,463
|
96%
|
310,864,612
|
India | 1,339,180,127
|
12%
|
162,040,795
|
Nigeria | 190,886,311
|
53%
|
101,818,758
|
Philippines | 104,918,090
|
93%
|
97,133,168
|
Pakistan | 197,015,955
|
49%
|
96,537,818
|
United Kingdom | 66,181,585
|
98%
|
64,685,881
|
Germany | 82,114,224
|
70%
|
57,479,957
|
Egypt | 97,553,151
|
35%
|
34,143,603
|
Canada | 36,624,199
|
86%
|
31,361,302
|
Bangladesh | 164,669,751
|
18%
|
29,640,555
|
Italy | 59,359,900
|
40%
|
23,743,960
|
Australia | 24,450,561
|
97%
|
23,717,044
|
France | 64,979,548
|
36%
|
23,392,637
|
Malaysia | 31,624,264
|
63%
|
19,787,302
|
Ghana | 28,833,629
|
67%
|
19,223,380
|
Thailand | 69,037,513
|
27%
|
18,750,589
|
South Africa | 56,717,156
|
31%
|
17,582,318
|
Mexico | 129,163,276
|
13%
|
16,662,063
|
Netherlands | 17,035,938
|
90%
|
15,332,344
|
Poland | 38,170,712
|
37%
|
14,123,163
|
China | 1,409,517,397
|
1%
|
14,095,174
|
Turkey | 80,745,020
|
17%
|
13,726,653
|
Nepal | 29,304,998
|
46%
|
13,623,894
|
Iraq | 38,274,618
|
35%
|
13,396,116
|
Brazil | 209,288,278
|
5%
|
10,464,414
|
Spain[d] | 46,354,321
|
22%
|
10,197,951
|
Sri Lanka | 20,876,917
|
48%
|
9,979,166
|
Kenya | 49,699,862
|
19%
|
9,358,484
|
Cameroon | 24,053,727
|
38%
|
9,140,416
|
Sweden | 9,910,701
|
90%
|
8,919,631
|
Russia | 143,989,754
|
5%
|
7,890,639
|
Israel | 8,321,570
|
85%
|
7,070,838
|
Zimbabwe | 16,529,904
|
42%
|
6,873,134
|
Belgium | 11,429,336
|
60%
|
6,857,602
|
Austria | 8,735,453
|
73%
|
6,376,881
|
Sierra Leone | 7,557,212
|
0.8353
|
6,312,539
|
Romania | 19,679,306
|
0.31
|
6,100,585
|
Greece | 11,159,773
|
51%
|
5,691,484
|
Tanzania[c] | 57,310,019
|
10%
|
5,667,961
|
Denmark | 5,733,551
|
0.91
|
5,217,531
|
Switzerland | 8,476,005
|
61%
|
5,194,096
|
Morocco | 35,739,580
|
14%
|
5,003,541
|
Norway[l] | 5,305,383
|
90%
|
4,774,845
|
Ireland | 4,761,657
|
98%
|
4,684,042
|
New Zealand | 4,705,818
|
0.9782
|
4,603,231
|
Madagascar | 25,570,895
|
18%
|
4,602,761
|
Singapore | 5,708,844
|
80%
|
4,567,075
|
Jordan | 9,702,353
|
0.45
|
4,366,059
|
Papua New Guinea | 8,251,162
|
50%
|
4,105,778
|
Liberia | 4,731,906
|
0.8267
|
3,911,867
|
Finland[k] | 5,523,231
|
70%
|
3,866,262
|
Uganda | 42,862,958
|
8%
|
3,467,613
|
Hong Kong | 7,364,883
|
0.4607
|
3,393,002
|
Algeria | 41,318,142
|
7%
|
2,892,270
|
Argentina | 44,271,041
|
7%
|
2,886,472
|
Czech Republic | 10,618,303
|
0.27
|
2,866,942
|
Jamaica | 2,890,299
|
0.9764
|
2,822,088
|
Portugal | 10,329,506
|
27%
|
2,788,967
|
Yemen | 28,250,420
|
9%
|
2,542,538
|
Colombia | 49,065,615
|
4%
|
2,070,569
|
Hungary | 9,721,559
|
0.2
|
1,944,312
|
Chile | 18,054,726
|
0.0953
|
1,720,615
|
Slovakia | 5,447,662
|
26%
|
1,416,392
|
Lithuania | 2,890,297
|
0.38
|
1,098,313
|
Latvia | 1,949,670
|
0.46
|
896,848
|
Botswana | 2,291,661
|
0.3842
|
880,456
|
Striker161 ( talk) 22:52:15 Saturday, 10 February 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Striker161 ( talk • contribs)
Should Tagalog be added to the list. It has over 70 million speakers. 2605:6001:EB50:A900:A97C:D188:DD51:706B ( talk) 01:39, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
Why were they removed? Hegsareta ( talk) 06:50, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
Hindi has 534 million speakers as L1 and L2 (273 million as L2). www.ethnologue.com/language/hin
When Ethnologue writes about Hindi, It's already considering Urdu as a dialect. It's possible to read it in "Dialects".
On the other hand, It's not correct to add 163 million Urdu speakers to 534 million Hindi speakers, because almost all people who can speak Urdu, are also speakers of Hindi as L2. There is a double counting. www.ethnologue.com/language/urd
So, inside the 273 million Hindi speakers as L2 are already the 163 million Urdu speakers.
--
Migang2g (
talk)
02:16, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
How can it have 0 native speakers and be 5th in rank? Vandalism? 98.143.70.197 ( talk) 14:00, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
The numbers for Persian are totally wrong. There are much more than 52 million speakers. Everyone in Iran can speak Persian. Iran alone has 80 million inhabitants (be it as mother tongue or L2). Then 1/3 of Afghanistan speak Persian as a mother tongue, it's also the main language (lingua franca) there. Everyone in Tajikistan speaks Persian. Main cities in Uzbekistan are Persian speaking. And there are about 5 million Iranians abroad. The wiki article about Persian itself says that there are 110 million Speakers (out of them 70 million as mother tongue). Here even the L2 are totally missing and the L1 only points out the numbers of native speakers in Iran.
pes
, not for the
language group "Persian" that includes Tajik, Dari, and other varieties, which are classified as separate languages.@ LiliCharlie: Please see the Dialects section in this link: https://www.ethnologue.com/language/hin
Where it says, "Khari Boli (Dehlavi, Kauravi, Khadi Boli, Khari, Khariboli, Vernacular Hindustani). Formal vocabulary borrowed from Sanskrit, de-Persianized, de-Arabicized. Literary Hindi, or Hindi-Urdu, has 4 varieties: Hindi (High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, Literary Hindi, standard Hindi); Urdu [urd]; Dakhini; Rekhta. Hindustani, though not listed separately in India, refers here to the unofficial lingua franca of northwest India. Has a lexical mixture in varying proportions of Hindi (vocabulary derived from Sanskrit) and Urdu (vocabulary derived from Persian or Arabic)."
So clearly Urdu is listed as a 4th variety of literary Hindi. 2607:9880:4038:B:51D3:E0A3:7839:252C ( talk) 14:19, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Western Punjabi, Korean, Javanese, Egyptian Arabic and Persian lack L2 numbers. The Ethnologue listing for Japanese says that it has only 121.5k L2 speakers. That seems to be too low to be close to the actual number (outside Japan, 132,317 people were certified for a JLPT level in the second test for 2018 alone), but I can't find another estimate. Hegsareta ( talk) 18:36, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
The ethnologue number of L2 speakers of Italian must be as there are 1 million people of Italian descent in Canada and everyone that I know can speak some Italian. So Ethnologue says that only 3 million L2 speakers exist. What about the 15 Italian descendents in Brazil. What about the 10 million Italian descendents in the US. What about North Africa, the balkans, Greece, South America. Total nonsense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.31.156.61 ( talk) 05:04, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
This article is based entirely on the Ethnologue data, which, as has been pointed out repeatedly above (and I agree) often seem to be too low. I wonder if it would be possible to get reliable estimates from a second, independent source. Does anyone know of such a source that could potentially be used? -- Krissie ( talk) 15:31, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
Pashto has more speakers than many of the 34 languages you have mentioned. 35 million in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, approximately 4 million in Sindh province mainly in its Karachi city, 0.5 million in Punjab province, above 5 million in Balochistan province, about 36 million in Afghanistan, and 7 million Pashtun diaspora in various countries of the world. It means that the total speakers of Pashtun language are nearly 90 million. Therefore, Pashto might be ranked at No. 8 in your list. Haaim ( talk) 11:56, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Since October 25th, 2019, Ethnologue requires a $480/year or $199/month subscription to see the number of speakers of any language. I won't be able to add data from the 23rd edition (2020) when it's available (or even see if it's available). Hegsareta ( talk) 13:43, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
Sorry Pashto might be ranked at No. 18 Haaim ( talk) 12:06, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Pashto might be ranked at No. 18 in your list. It has about 36 million speakers in Afghanistan 35 million in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan 4 million in Sindh province mainly in Karachi city Pakistan 5 million in Balochistan Pakistan 0.5 million in Punjab 7 million Pashtun diaspora in various countries of the world Total speakers of Pashto are about 90 million. Please update your list with the correct information. Haaim ( talk) 12:01, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Kindly add some more languages so that the languages with population 20 million may be shown here. 182.186.66.91 ( talk) 13:13, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
Well, there are 200 million people in Brazil, and I don't know the numbers of the other countries which talk portuguese, but there are six others. So, how can '178 millions' be right? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.250.48.194 ( talk) 00:09, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
The countries that speak Portuguese as a native language are: Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Moçambique, Guiné Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Cabo Verde, Timor Leste, and Guiné Equatorial. Google says the population of Brazil is currently 209M, Angola and are at 29M each, and Portugal at 10M, never mind the smaller countries. Something's definitely wrong with the statistic for Portuguese... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.75.0.210 ( talk) 12:21, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
Doesn't match the count present in the link I attached as reference. The total number of Portuguese speakers it's clearly much higher than the number presented in this article. (At least 282 million) [1] 185.246.30.152 ( talk) 13:40, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
References
I have heard that the L2 value for Arabic is spurious. I haven't personally checked that, but assuming it is true, I believe that Arabic (not just Egyptian Arabic) should be added back to the list in place of Egyptian Arabic (somebody took off Arabic due to the false claim that "Arabic as a whole is not considered a single language", which contradicts both general scholarly consensus and other articles on Wikipedia (which views Arabic as a single language with both a (literary) standard and several regional varieties/dialects; I think this is similar to the case of the standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian). Just like with the other languages with "spurious" L2 values, we can just list it as such (or we just leave the numbers just as ethologue did. with a note that the number is spurious; this can be applied to all "spurious" numbers.).
Sawtguren ( talk) 06:30, 15 May 2014 (UTC)
Article states that so-called "[m]acro languages" like Arabic, Chinese, et al, are a difficult to define, and therefore are subject to error "of the order of 25%". The sentiment relating to the uncertainty of classification is more or less correct, but Chinese is not a macro language, at least not as conceived here. In fact, it is a family of languages whose various branches can differ as wildly as the Germanic languages do from one another (take, say, English, Portuguese, and German). To say otherwise does a disservice to the truth of the situation -- some of these languages have probably been distinct from one another for millennia. It IS a common error, though, because almost all of the Chinese languages use most of the same written characters. -- DrHennessy ( talk) 21:23, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
Hello there, I think u’ve made a mistake about total number of speakers. The page has ignored people with Persian language as their second language and it’s kinda disrespectful to ignore those people. Total number of Persian speaking ppl is around 110 million and u can find the references under my edition of the page. So please go read the references before rewinding the page to the 55 million version. With considering Persian speakers population only as 55 million, you are ignoring Iranian kurds, Iranian Turkmens, Iranian Arabs, Iranian Baluchs, Iranian Azeris, Iranian Armenians, Iranian Georgians, Iranian Lurs, Iranian Bakhtiaris etc. all of these ethnicities speak Persian as their second language which is not considered by Wikipedia which may bring rage and hate against wikipedia. There are also other people in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Bahrain etc. who speak Persian as their second language. We don’t care if the unified source is complete or not. We just care about being considered in the numbers. So please respect us and consider us as people with their second language as Persian.
From a Bakhtiari minatory in Iran. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.115.18.69 ( talk • contribs) 22:59, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
pes
(Iranian Persian, following
their classification of Persian languages) is inaccurate you can send an email to
feedback@ethnologue.com and ask them to correct that.
Love —
LiliCharlie (
talk)
00:24, 20 February 2021 (UTC)Ethnologue has just released its 24th edition. However, they haven't updated yet the top 200 page. Does anyone have an account on Ethnologue to update the list? A455bcd9 ( talk) 17:02, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
Iran has a total population of 82 million people of all can speak Persian as their first or second language plus the population of Afghanistan 38 million and Tajikistan 9 million which all can speak "Iranian Persian" as their second language, the number of total speakers can't be only 74 million! 81.213.249.129 ( talk) 22:36, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
Some recent changes seem to have corrupted a lot of data. Implausible figures, wrong sums and doubtful to high and to low data. Who could check, I don't have access to appropriate data bases, thanks Ulrich Nillurcheier ( talk) 08:36, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
While you're at it, please correct language family and grouping information, ie. Polish is labeled as Balto-Slavic but Russian as Slavic, (when both are Slavic and members of BS group). I'm sure there are more of this mistakes there. 78.10.206.229 ( talk) 17:25, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
It claims the number of native English speakers is 300 million. However, the US population exceeds that, and then there is Canada, Great Britain, and what about India? One of its official languages is English, for crying out loud.
I just now got my account in order to register this complaint. I guess a more constructive thing to do would be to set the record straight. Maybe I will spend a little time this weekend on it. I just don't understand why somebody would bother to post clearly inaccurate figures ... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugenepete ( talk • contribs) 02:53, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but a lot of people in the USA aren't English native speakers. Whether you like it or not, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA have substantial immigrant populations with the USA having by far the most immigrants in the world at 50.6 million according to worldpopulationreview.com with Saudi Arabia at third place with 13.5 million and Germany at second place with 15.8 million (too lazy to swap places). Most of those immigrants don't speak English with Spanish being the second most common language in the USA by native speakers due to Mexico being the largest source of US immigrants. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.6.253.145 ( talk) 01:20, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
I don't understand why there is a separate row in the table for "total Chinese", surely this could be handled with an asterisk if the desire is to indicate that the Chinese speak multiple languages. This is a table of languages, and the row above clearly states "Mandarin" not "Chinese". Comparitvely countries with multiple languages like Switzerland, Canada, and the United States of America do not contain similar distinctions. 1durphul ( talk) 03:59, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
I assume that rounding should be eliminated, as it affects data accuracy. How alleged 166M of speakers of Russian could turn into 170M? How 203M speakers of Portueguese could turn into 200M? 4 millions of people matter!!! The rounding should be disabled, in my view. What are your opininon? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Suncatcher 13 ( talk • contribs) 16:50, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
240 (L1) plus 92 (L2), it must be 332 million in total (which gets it in the 6th place - between Hindi and French). Perhaps this record of the table should be corrected. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.114.30.30 ( talk • contribs) 07:40, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
Maybe that the number of mother tounge speakers are not that high, since many of the rural swahili speakers have a local tribal language which they learn to speak before they learn swahili, but, close to everybody in both Kenya, Tanzania and a huge number of Rwandans, Burundis, Ugandans and eastern DRC, speak swahili, they will easily pass 100 million, so it's more than strange, they are not on the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.227.81.60 ( talk) 21:05, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
As usual people on the ground are ignored but European or American are the ones who feel entitled to edit and omit when we know the truth that there could be more than 150m speakers Nlivataye ( talk) 11:25, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
And in Tanzania itself I currently know no one in the younger generation who doesn't speak Swahili as their first language and this in a country of 64 million people where 70% are below the age of 30 Nlivataye ( talk) 11:26, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Number of Turkish speakers should be in this list as well. Turkey's population is over 70 million just by itself. When you add Turks who live abroad (Germany, Belgium, Netherlands) and people who can speak Turkish (in the way it is spoken in Turkey) in some Turkic countries such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, Syria, Iraq, Iran then the number is easily over 100m. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.233.61.25 ( talk) 08:59, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
I think it was on the list in some previous version. Who deleted it? Quanstizium ( talk) 21:28, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
Entitled people who think they know all facts and don't even live in Turkey Nlivataye ( talk) 11:28, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Please listen to actual Swahili speakers in the region and many sources online. Tanzania is home to 64 million people and while there are hundreds of tribes and different other languages most now speak Swahili as their first language so Tanzania alone is enough to remove that bogus 16 million number for native speakers. Then there is Kenya another big second largest Swahili speaking country of 55 million which also have several tribes and languages but also largely speaks Swahili as their first language and the same for Eastern DRC which is almost half the country of 100 million and not to mention Other millions in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and substantial numbers in Zambia, Mozambique, Somalia, Comoros and Oman. So Native speakers should be at least around 50 million while second around 50 to 70 million and overall almost 200 million Nlivataye ( talk) 11:32, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
The Highest Estimation For Indonesian/Malay is lower than the Mode Average Estimation for just Indonesian. I know these lists are difficult - I'm just flagging it. -- Chriswaterguy talk 14:25, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
Ethnologue's estimates appear to be complete specious and impossible, as well. They claim 335 million English speakers as a first language. There are 316 million people in the USA, 63 million people in the UK, 35 million in Canada (28 million English speakers), 23 million in Australia, and another 9 million in Ireland and New Zealand (together). You see where this is going, right? Even if only 80% of those English-language speaking countries' populations actually speak English as a first language, it's still at least 350 million English speakers. My bet is the percentage is closer to 90% of the roughly 440 million residents of those countries (ignoring English as a first language speakers in the rest of world), or 395+ million. Ethnologue's estimate is thus off by a wide margin, especially on a so easily double-checked figure. 75.168.11.118 ( talk) 01:54, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
English was perhaps the most closely accurate portrayed language. Try Swahili which they claim native speakers are 16 million and overall 74m when native speakers are around 60 million and overall 200 million Nlivataye ( talk) 11:35, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
0 for Arabic? Are you guys serious? Hundreds of millions speak Arabic as their first language Nlivataye ( talk) 11:27, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
And you don't think that's bogus given English isn't classified as British English, American English, Australian English, Nigerian or Indian English? Nlivataye ( talk) 11:37, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Ukrainian language article states there are 40 million native speakers and around 45 million total. This language should be in the list. I suspect there are parties who don't want this to be common knowledge. Anyway to add it back and prevent from removing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rumoku ( talk • contribs) 17:50, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
There is a serious problem with the all the data listed here in this arcticle due to two reasons: First: Survey years are not given. Second: Number of speakers should be put into perspective by also showing how large percentage did speakers of any particular language form in the year when the survey was taken, something like: 1. English 1,400 - 1,800 million; 23% - 30% of worlds population in 1997 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.131.29.94 ( talk) 05:00, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to know if I'm counted in as an engrish speaker? Does my Maghrebi arabic include french? 88.195.46.112 ( talk) 04:52, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't understand the reason to state that figures for French include the Maghreb Area... It is right to say that the figure include French Creole because it is a variant of French but... the data include French-speaker of the 3 french-speaking (and it is French, not a variant of the language as a creole is) Maghreb states and rightly so...it doesn't mean anything... Easyboy82 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.222.27.206 ( talk) 21:58, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Where is Dutch? —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
85.144.100.44 (
talk)
16:48, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
German seems a little high at 229 million. The country of Germany only has about 82 million people, and Switzerland and Austria each have about 8 million. I'm not sure where the rest of the 130 million plus German speakers are supposed to come from. 70.176.120.225 ( talk) 07:05, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
Long time listener, first time caller: Given what appears to be many discrepancies listed below (especially, for example, Ukrainian) should Ethnologue be treated as a reliable source? NotYourLawyer ( talk) 22:25, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
This is very racist why Arabic not adding like a language it has more than 400 millions native speakers and they can understand each other even though they have different dialect but still same language they understand each other from country to contry that's super weird tha statistics in this article not fair and not valid in reality 77.232.123.20 ( talk) 22:05, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
There’s an error with the numbering. It shows the title as #1 instead of English. GamerKlim9716 ( talk) 07:51, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
Is there no better source available than paywall protected Ethnologue. Readers of this article are not able to view the remainder of the top 200 spoken languages. Paywall sources really shouldn't be used on wikipedia. Blario ( talk) 22:44, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
Being behind a paywall is not a big problem, far worse is how poor Ethnologue generally is (as a reminder, it is originally a Christian evangelical outreach and not an academic institution). However, it's often the only thing we have. If someone said no information is better than wrong information, I'd be willing to lend an ear and have this article deleted. It's not flat out wrong but it's not really reliable either. Jeppiz ( talk) 23:12, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
09:52, 12 March 2023 94.109.1.221 talk 18,045 bytes −6 No edit summary undo Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit
This edit changed "Standard German" to "German Language" and added about 50M speakers. The reference link provided (
https://www.ethnologue.com/25/language/deu) is not accessible (behind paywall?). "German Language" cannot be found at
https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/, therefore does not represent the source of the section well; also it cannot be found through Ethnologue website's search function. Should this edit be reverted?
Υφ22 (
talk) 03:24, 20 March 2023 (UTC) --
Υφ22 (
talk)
03:25, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
According to the Wikipedia article, 44 mln speakers (L1+L2) of the Uzbek language exist! Therefore, the Uzbek language should come in 40-41th place on this (first) list! 145.118.206.222 ( talk) 09:30, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I have noticed aa critical flaw in this list related to Punjabi, which is subdivided into Eastern and Western Punjabi, which themselves are families of dialects and not a language. Instead there should be just one category "Punjabic", which actually is the language consisting of dialects or languages. If that is not possible the there should be Punjabi, Hindko, Saraiki, Pothohari, etc. PeoplesRepublicOfChina01 ( talk) 11:02, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
Could anyone who has access to their paywalled data update the list based on the Ethnologue 2023 figures? The List of languages by number of native speakers is already up-to-date, but not yet this article.
Also, I notice that their own top 200 list apparently hasn't been updated for 2023 yet, even though that edition has apparently been available for some time – a bit strange. Krissie ( talk) 13:28, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
I've looked at this page's sources and I cannot figure out where, for example, they get an estimate for "Chinese" of 1.4 billion speakers. It's not in any of the three sources. In fact even George Weber's high-extreme estimate for Chinese is only 1.2 billion, although that was admittedly over fifteen years ago. I am going to rewrite the figures on this page using only the figures from Ethnologue, because both other sources appear to be at least ten years out of date. I'm also removing the high-extreme figures because they cover native speakers, not total speakers. Khin2718 ( talk) 18:40, 12 December 2009 (UTC)
250 or 350 Million? -- 84.113.52.244 ( talk) 08:32, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
According to the articles referenced, it is 250 million, which indicates we should revert back to that. It seems that we spend more time on reverting vandalism that getting the facts straight. But is this an article just about George Weber's estimate, or on the actual number? We really need a range of numbers based on a range of references, otherwise this becomes either a wikipediaization of one person's research, or a platform for why my language should higher figures/is more important. OrhanCharles 03:53, 28 May 2010 (UTC) —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
OrhanCharles (
talk •
contribs)
Don't ya guys think this is too specific? It's not really even a list! It just says: "This is just an estimation!"! I was looking for a way more informative and more 'up-to-date' info. Didn't this come from 1997? What happend to the 21st century?- 6/10/2010, 6:43pm (Central) (Don't you dare, SineBot, sign my IP!!)
(Same Person as last time) WAKE UP WIKIPEDIA! I'm starting to think you guys are stupid! All ya guys care about is the "Most Important" ones. You guy didn't even fix the YOG 2010 (Search Singapore 2010 and you'll find it.) articles, let alone the USA team. I'm gonna stop using Wiki for a moment. Bye! :( —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.170.216.184 ( talk) 12:48, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
I know it's been discussed for multiple languages above but the numbers here and in List of languages by number of native speakers differ radically. There are more native speakers than total speakers for at least one language (Hindi/Urdu). Ethnologue is cited as the primary source for both, but Hindi/Urdu cites another, probably less reliable source (BBC language lessons).
Without some standard to reconcile widely differing sources, these articles make no sense. I don't have inclination to sort this out but IMO both articles are dubious as-is. Feel free to either provide better footnotes on what's what or fix the numbers, then delete the dubious template i added. - PhilipR ( talk) 13:57, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
Something is wrong in those numbers. For example:
Number of portuguese native speakers: 220 million
Number of portuguese secondary speakers: 28 million
Total number of native and secondary speakers of portuguese: 188 million
So 220+28=188 ??????????????
French: 75+190 = 270 ???-- viriatus ( talk) 15:18, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Language counts are so far far out of date here, they should not even be given at all. English and Spanish are both wrong. America has 300 million population, and you only have the whole english language speakers as not much more than that. They must both be at least 400 million now or more. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.13.168.139 ( talk) 06:01, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
might it be suitable to acknowledge other common estimates? it would only be fair to allow any wellsourced reference... as noted in numerous cases above, there are many counts that are not necessarily any more or less accurate, but are nonetheless left out. common things I might like to see:
--— robbie page talk 21:07, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
REally, that make no sense since Brazil has 193 million population and portugal has 11 million. it would be 202 million using portuguese as first language. If we add angola, mozambique, timor and the other portuguese colonies, we get a number around 250 million. it is the true.
201.78.165.232 ( talk) 17:17, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
Hi there the link which is used as reference says "Population 46,300,000 in Turkey (1987). Population total all countries: 50,733,420."
http://www.ethnologue.com/language/tur
Are you serious about using this link as reference?We are in 2013!Please update this page and use the current references.-- 78.189.170.134 ( talk) 09:18, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
There is an obvious mistake in the Weber's estimate table
. Spanish 395 mill. 20 mill. 3375 mill.
I am not sure what the correct number is (415 mill?) but it's definitely not 3,3 billion — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.242.76.246 ( talk) 14:40, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Somehow, according to the table containing Weber's estimates, 365 million native English speakers plus 150 million second language speakers equals 480 million total speakers. If the native and second language speaker estimates are to be believed, the actual total speaker figure should be 515 million.
The link to reference 36 does not ultimately lead to the referenced source.
MJVEDLMA ( talk) 00:32, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
Where is the language data of the 2011 India census? I thoroughly checked the Internet and found nothing but "not yet published" !-- Loup Solitaire 81 ( talk) 17:52, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
Someone pointed me towards Telugu being in the Ethnologue table twice. I'm not sure if one was a mistake, or a test-edit, or a newer citation. No time to dig through the history, so noting it here. HTH. Quiddity ( talk) 18:02, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
Re L2 speakers of German, "80 million in Germany (no date)" - is that the figure for the total L1 plus L2? Similar issue for Bengali: "166 million in Bangladesh and 90 million in India (2011 Census)" seems to refer to total speakers. -- Chriswaterguy talk 13:27, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
Those estimations are ridiculous. 700 million of French speakers? The credibility of wiki is zero. There are around 125 million speakers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.236.227.138 ( talk) 02:09, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
If it was written 700 millions speakers for french before, it is totally ridiculous... The new number of 74 millions speakers is laughable in the other sense... There are neither 700 millions nor are they only 75 millions native french speakers. One number is ridiculously high, the other ridiculously low. The sources vary as too how many people exactly speak french as a mothertongue, due to the complexity of having exact numbers from reliable sources in the whole world. I guess the most reasonable estimations vary between 220 millions (german source) and 265 millions (italian source). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.14.227.246 ( talk) 01:21, 9 December 2014 (UTC)
Persian Langues has 110 million people but is not in here! why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Qian.neewan ( talk • contribs) 08:47, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Is there any reason not to delete the KyrssTal estimates? They're self-published without any sources, and neither of the website's proprietors ( Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi) seems to be any sort of linguistic or demographic scholar. — Neil 22:29, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
I disagree with kwami edits to remove Statista. The Ethnologue website is also eCommerce website https://www.ethnologue.com/cart selling language articles and maps. PradeepBoston ( talk) 21:06, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
I do not agree with your AFAICT. Statista is Statistical reference used by Wall Street Journal and other news sites. "Statista is a reliable and comprehensive source for The Wall Street Journal - Jason Bellini, Editor, The Wall Street Journal" PradeepBoston ( talk) 22:36, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. More data is better as everyone has POV. It is hard to define language boundaries. PradeepBoston ( talk) 20:09, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
There's a fairly clear consensus to merge.— Neil P. Quinn ( talk) 04:02, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
Both these pages cover very similar ground. On the total speakers page, both the Ethnologue and Weber estimates separate out native, second language, and total speakers, and using sortable tables means that the list can work for all three.
The native speakers page only includes one estimate, from Nationalencyklopedin. Adding it to the total speakers page, and then renaming that page "list of languages by number of speakers" would consolidate everything nicely. — Neil P. Quinn ( talk) 06:33, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
No issues. Please go ahead. PradeepBoston ( talk) 19:01, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Per " talk:list of languages by number of native speakers#Merge completed" and " talk:list of languages by number of speakers#merge," the merge between this page and " list of languages by number of native speakers" did not work out and the pages have been unmerged again. Should the merge-discussion notification on this page be removed then? Nicole Sharp ( talk) 21:46, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
Just FYI, but I took the time to compile the data from " list of languages by number of native speakers," " list of languages by total number of speakers," and each individual language's Wikipedia page to create this list: " user:Nicole Sharp/languages by population." Since it combines multiple sources and multiple dates from across Wikipedia, not sure if it is proper to copy into the Wikipedia article here, but feel free to use it if you like. Nicole Sharp ( talk) 21:27, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
The Thai numbers are way off. There are about 63 million people living in Thailand, and it is the only official language there, well over 90 % should speak it. Thai_Language lists 60 - 65 million speakers. The figure on this page seem to be from 1990... I bet other languages have the same problem. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.226.97.7 ( talk) 21:29, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
References
This article based on data from a Christian missionary website is a total nonsense.-- Professional Assassin ( talk) 21:36, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
Why? they have a vested interest in knowing how to allocated their missionary resources. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.180.45.209 ( talk) 23:43, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
Why does the table is sorted by invisible values? Why was the Russian, with 166 proven speakers, ranked higher than Portuguese with 200M speakers? If no exact total values are known, sorting should be done by L1 column. Not by alleged total value. And this proven (not alleged) sum should be listed in "Total' column. That would be fair! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Suncatcher 13 ( talk • contribs) 16:57, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
The list says that there are 55 million L2 speakers of German in Germany, which amounts to 2/3 of the country’s total population. However I am sure that at least 90% of German speakers in Germany are L1 speakers, so this figure can’t be true. Milton Alan Turner of Saint Ignatius Highschool, Cleveland reports 9 million German L2 speakers altogether, which seems much more realistic. LiliCharlie ( talk) 19:56, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
The list by native speakers says that over 140 million Indonesians speak Indonesian as a second language, in addition to the 20 million or so who speak it natively. Furthermore, the population of Indonesia itself is over 230 million (4th most populous nation in the world), and the official language of the nation is Indonesian.
I don't know if there are any sources regarding the actual number of Indonesian speakers in Indonesia, but i'm sure they would make the list. I only care because I happen to be one of those speakers of Indonesian as a second language (though I'm American). Chas ( talk) 18:10, 24 December 2009 (UTC)
Linguistically speaking, Indonesian is a dialect; it's mutually intelligible with other dialects of Malay, such as Bahasa Malaysia. This is backed up by the wikipedia article "Malay Language."
Wikipedia contradicts itself when the Malay article claims 180mil total speakers based on ethnologue without listing it up there with Bengali in this list. This point remains if you disregard Malay and consider just the Wikipedia 'Indonesian Language' article which cites ethnologue for 165 million. I'd edit it, but my changes always get reversed, I've given up.
Having had some exposure to both Malaysian and Indonesian, they are indeed very similar but only barely mutually intelligible. They are in the same sense that a German speaker listening very carefully to a Dutch speaker may be able to understand with a bit of work. It is, therefor, fallacious to list them as the same language. 67.168.203.190 ( talk) 01:00, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
I support the frustration of other users... The population of Indonesia is in excess of 250 million and for the past 50 years Bahasa Indonesia has been the sole language of education, government and media across the country, with literacy rates well above 90% it is simply ludicrous to say that so few people speak Malayu/Indonesian as listed by ethnologue. On top of this Malayu/indonesian is the lingua franca of Borneo and malaysia and one of the primary languages of Singapore. Varients of malayu are spoken across southern Micronesia, Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines. 300 million total speakers would be a conservative estimate making it one of the top global languages. Somehow it appears this does not fit our global paradigm...
As for comments that Malay and Indonesian are not interchangable or far from similar, please explain that to the millions of Indonesian's who watch Malay movies and sitcoms every day and vice versa. On seperate occasions I have travelled through each countries with native speakers from the other country on their first trips to their neighbouring nation. At no stage did either have trouble communicating fluently carrying on detailed discussions in a language in a country they had never been to before. I myself though fluent in Indonesian as a second language find I can chat extensively with malaysians, understanding at least 85%-90% of all words and easily guessing the meaning through clear word association for most of the rest. Bigyabbie ( talk) 08:24, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
This
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This article should be semi-protected as it has been vandalized everyday for a very longtime now.
70.51.84.138 (
talk)
15:04, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
Is there an article on Wikipedia that looks at the historical change of the sorts of data shown in this list?
Say 1800, 1900, 1950, 1970, 1980, and so forth?
It would be encyclopedic, and interesting to our global readership, if any data sources are available.
Cheers. N2e ( talk) 17:53, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
I have seen this statement repeatedly on Wikipedia: "Urdu is mutually intelligible to Hindi." It appears on several pages, but I don't think any of them are cited. What basis do we have for this? Urdu and Hindi have differences, which cause them not to fit the definition of "mutual intelligibility." To what extent of similarity between two languages does there have to be before Wikipedia considers it mutually intelligible. I think we at least need a qualifier here to note the differences. Abierma3 ( talk) 04:49, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
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How can there be 78 million first language speakers when there are already 83 million people in Germany, plus Austria, parts of Switzerland and Belgium? I know they speak strange dialects but still they're supposed to be German-speaking... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.174.247.217 ( talk) 00:35, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
About 90% is the 82 million people in Germany speak German as their first language https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/180022/umfrage/deutsch-als-muttersprache-in-der-familie/
That would be 73.8 million. I guess the numbers are similar for the 9 million people in Austria. MartinThoma ( talk) 20:44, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
Why is this included under Arabic as a 'variant'? It is an independent language. This classification is ignorant at best, though probably illegal. Wikipedia, wake up and hire some decent linguists. Relying on crappy professors and students with too much time on their hands has done you no favours. 193.188.33.23 ( talk) 14:29, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
How is it illegal? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.243.253.117 ( talk) 10:28, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
Linguistically, Maltese is a dialect of Arabic, descended from the otherwise extinct Sicilian Arabic dialect. So, if all dialects(some not mutually intellegible) of Arabic (not just the standard form) are supposed to be included, you might include Maltese. Maltese does use a different script than Standard Arabic, but , after all, Hindi and Urdu are counted as one single language, even though Hindi uses Devanagari script while Urdu uses Arabic script. Quanstizium ( talk) 21:37, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
According to The Telegraph article, Mapped: Where to go if you can't be bothered to learn the language, I've calculated the number of English speakers at far more than 1,387,530,865. How is this "Ethnologue's" figure so far off this mark?
Nation | Population | English Speaking % | Total English Speakers |
United States | 324,459,463
|
96%
|
310,864,612
|
India | 1,339,180,127
|
12%
|
162,040,795
|
Nigeria | 190,886,311
|
53%
|
101,818,758
|
Philippines | 104,918,090
|
93%
|
97,133,168
|
Pakistan | 197,015,955
|
49%
|
96,537,818
|
United Kingdom | 66,181,585
|
98%
|
64,685,881
|
Germany | 82,114,224
|
70%
|
57,479,957
|
Egypt | 97,553,151
|
35%
|
34,143,603
|
Canada | 36,624,199
|
86%
|
31,361,302
|
Bangladesh | 164,669,751
|
18%
|
29,640,555
|
Italy | 59,359,900
|
40%
|
23,743,960
|
Australia | 24,450,561
|
97%
|
23,717,044
|
France | 64,979,548
|
36%
|
23,392,637
|
Malaysia | 31,624,264
|
63%
|
19,787,302
|
Ghana | 28,833,629
|
67%
|
19,223,380
|
Thailand | 69,037,513
|
27%
|
18,750,589
|
South Africa | 56,717,156
|
31%
|
17,582,318
|
Mexico | 129,163,276
|
13%
|
16,662,063
|
Netherlands | 17,035,938
|
90%
|
15,332,344
|
Poland | 38,170,712
|
37%
|
14,123,163
|
China | 1,409,517,397
|
1%
|
14,095,174
|
Turkey | 80,745,020
|
17%
|
13,726,653
|
Nepal | 29,304,998
|
46%
|
13,623,894
|
Iraq | 38,274,618
|
35%
|
13,396,116
|
Brazil | 209,288,278
|
5%
|
10,464,414
|
Spain[d] | 46,354,321
|
22%
|
10,197,951
|
Sri Lanka | 20,876,917
|
48%
|
9,979,166
|
Kenya | 49,699,862
|
19%
|
9,358,484
|
Cameroon | 24,053,727
|
38%
|
9,140,416
|
Sweden | 9,910,701
|
90%
|
8,919,631
|
Russia | 143,989,754
|
5%
|
7,890,639
|
Israel | 8,321,570
|
85%
|
7,070,838
|
Zimbabwe | 16,529,904
|
42%
|
6,873,134
|
Belgium | 11,429,336
|
60%
|
6,857,602
|
Austria | 8,735,453
|
73%
|
6,376,881
|
Sierra Leone | 7,557,212
|
0.8353
|
6,312,539
|
Romania | 19,679,306
|
0.31
|
6,100,585
|
Greece | 11,159,773
|
51%
|
5,691,484
|
Tanzania[c] | 57,310,019
|
10%
|
5,667,961
|
Denmark | 5,733,551
|
0.91
|
5,217,531
|
Switzerland | 8,476,005
|
61%
|
5,194,096
|
Morocco | 35,739,580
|
14%
|
5,003,541
|
Norway[l] | 5,305,383
|
90%
|
4,774,845
|
Ireland | 4,761,657
|
98%
|
4,684,042
|
New Zealand | 4,705,818
|
0.9782
|
4,603,231
|
Madagascar | 25,570,895
|
18%
|
4,602,761
|
Singapore | 5,708,844
|
80%
|
4,567,075
|
Jordan | 9,702,353
|
0.45
|
4,366,059
|
Papua New Guinea | 8,251,162
|
50%
|
4,105,778
|
Liberia | 4,731,906
|
0.8267
|
3,911,867
|
Finland[k] | 5,523,231
|
70%
|
3,866,262
|
Uganda | 42,862,958
|
8%
|
3,467,613
|
Hong Kong | 7,364,883
|
0.4607
|
3,393,002
|
Algeria | 41,318,142
|
7%
|
2,892,270
|
Argentina | 44,271,041
|
7%
|
2,886,472
|
Czech Republic | 10,618,303
|
0.27
|
2,866,942
|
Jamaica | 2,890,299
|
0.9764
|
2,822,088
|
Portugal | 10,329,506
|
27%
|
2,788,967
|
Yemen | 28,250,420
|
9%
|
2,542,538
|
Colombia | 49,065,615
|
4%
|
2,070,569
|
Hungary | 9,721,559
|
0.2
|
1,944,312
|
Chile | 18,054,726
|
0.0953
|
1,720,615
|
Slovakia | 5,447,662
|
26%
|
1,416,392
|
Lithuania | 2,890,297
|
0.38
|
1,098,313
|
Latvia | 1,949,670
|
0.46
|
896,848
|
Botswana | 2,291,661
|
0.3842
|
880,456
|
Striker161 ( talk) 22:52:15 Saturday, 10 February 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Striker161 ( talk • contribs)
Should Tagalog be added to the list. It has over 70 million speakers. 2605:6001:EB50:A900:A97C:D188:DD51:706B ( talk) 01:39, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
Why were they removed? Hegsareta ( talk) 06:50, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
Hindi has 534 million speakers as L1 and L2 (273 million as L2). www.ethnologue.com/language/hin
When Ethnologue writes about Hindi, It's already considering Urdu as a dialect. It's possible to read it in "Dialects".
On the other hand, It's not correct to add 163 million Urdu speakers to 534 million Hindi speakers, because almost all people who can speak Urdu, are also speakers of Hindi as L2. There is a double counting. www.ethnologue.com/language/urd
So, inside the 273 million Hindi speakers as L2 are already the 163 million Urdu speakers.
--
Migang2g (
talk)
02:16, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
How can it have 0 native speakers and be 5th in rank? Vandalism? 98.143.70.197 ( talk) 14:00, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
The numbers for Persian are totally wrong. There are much more than 52 million speakers. Everyone in Iran can speak Persian. Iran alone has 80 million inhabitants (be it as mother tongue or L2). Then 1/3 of Afghanistan speak Persian as a mother tongue, it's also the main language (lingua franca) there. Everyone in Tajikistan speaks Persian. Main cities in Uzbekistan are Persian speaking. And there are about 5 million Iranians abroad. The wiki article about Persian itself says that there are 110 million Speakers (out of them 70 million as mother tongue). Here even the L2 are totally missing and the L1 only points out the numbers of native speakers in Iran.
pes
, not for the
language group "Persian" that includes Tajik, Dari, and other varieties, which are classified as separate languages.@ LiliCharlie: Please see the Dialects section in this link: https://www.ethnologue.com/language/hin
Where it says, "Khari Boli (Dehlavi, Kauravi, Khadi Boli, Khari, Khariboli, Vernacular Hindustani). Formal vocabulary borrowed from Sanskrit, de-Persianized, de-Arabicized. Literary Hindi, or Hindi-Urdu, has 4 varieties: Hindi (High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, Literary Hindi, standard Hindi); Urdu [urd]; Dakhini; Rekhta. Hindustani, though not listed separately in India, refers here to the unofficial lingua franca of northwest India. Has a lexical mixture in varying proportions of Hindi (vocabulary derived from Sanskrit) and Urdu (vocabulary derived from Persian or Arabic)."
So clearly Urdu is listed as a 4th variety of literary Hindi. 2607:9880:4038:B:51D3:E0A3:7839:252C ( talk) 14:19, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Western Punjabi, Korean, Javanese, Egyptian Arabic and Persian lack L2 numbers. The Ethnologue listing for Japanese says that it has only 121.5k L2 speakers. That seems to be too low to be close to the actual number (outside Japan, 132,317 people were certified for a JLPT level in the second test for 2018 alone), but I can't find another estimate. Hegsareta ( talk) 18:36, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
The ethnologue number of L2 speakers of Italian must be as there are 1 million people of Italian descent in Canada and everyone that I know can speak some Italian. So Ethnologue says that only 3 million L2 speakers exist. What about the 15 Italian descendents in Brazil. What about the 10 million Italian descendents in the US. What about North Africa, the balkans, Greece, South America. Total nonsense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.31.156.61 ( talk) 05:04, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
This article is based entirely on the Ethnologue data, which, as has been pointed out repeatedly above (and I agree) often seem to be too low. I wonder if it would be possible to get reliable estimates from a second, independent source. Does anyone know of such a source that could potentially be used? -- Krissie ( talk) 15:31, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
Pashto has more speakers than many of the 34 languages you have mentioned. 35 million in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, approximately 4 million in Sindh province mainly in its Karachi city, 0.5 million in Punjab province, above 5 million in Balochistan province, about 36 million in Afghanistan, and 7 million Pashtun diaspora in various countries of the world. It means that the total speakers of Pashtun language are nearly 90 million. Therefore, Pashto might be ranked at No. 8 in your list. Haaim ( talk) 11:56, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Since October 25th, 2019, Ethnologue requires a $480/year or $199/month subscription to see the number of speakers of any language. I won't be able to add data from the 23rd edition (2020) when it's available (or even see if it's available). Hegsareta ( talk) 13:43, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
Sorry Pashto might be ranked at No. 18 Haaim ( talk) 12:06, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Pashto might be ranked at No. 18 in your list. It has about 36 million speakers in Afghanistan 35 million in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan 4 million in Sindh province mainly in Karachi city Pakistan 5 million in Balochistan Pakistan 0.5 million in Punjab 7 million Pashtun diaspora in various countries of the world Total speakers of Pashto are about 90 million. Please update your list with the correct information. Haaim ( talk) 12:01, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
Kindly add some more languages so that the languages with population 20 million may be shown here. 182.186.66.91 ( talk) 13:13, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
Well, there are 200 million people in Brazil, and I don't know the numbers of the other countries which talk portuguese, but there are six others. So, how can '178 millions' be right? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.250.48.194 ( talk) 00:09, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
The countries that speak Portuguese as a native language are: Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Moçambique, Guiné Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, Cabo Verde, Timor Leste, and Guiné Equatorial. Google says the population of Brazil is currently 209M, Angola and are at 29M each, and Portugal at 10M, never mind the smaller countries. Something's definitely wrong with the statistic for Portuguese... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 177.75.0.210 ( talk) 12:21, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
Doesn't match the count present in the link I attached as reference. The total number of Portuguese speakers it's clearly much higher than the number presented in this article. (At least 282 million) [1] 185.246.30.152 ( talk) 13:40, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
References
I have heard that the L2 value for Arabic is spurious. I haven't personally checked that, but assuming it is true, I believe that Arabic (not just Egyptian Arabic) should be added back to the list in place of Egyptian Arabic (somebody took off Arabic due to the false claim that "Arabic as a whole is not considered a single language", which contradicts both general scholarly consensus and other articles on Wikipedia (which views Arabic as a single language with both a (literary) standard and several regional varieties/dialects; I think this is similar to the case of the standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian). Just like with the other languages with "spurious" L2 values, we can just list it as such (or we just leave the numbers just as ethologue did. with a note that the number is spurious; this can be applied to all "spurious" numbers.).
Sawtguren ( talk) 06:30, 15 May 2014 (UTC)
Article states that so-called "[m]acro languages" like Arabic, Chinese, et al, are a difficult to define, and therefore are subject to error "of the order of 25%". The sentiment relating to the uncertainty of classification is more or less correct, but Chinese is not a macro language, at least not as conceived here. In fact, it is a family of languages whose various branches can differ as wildly as the Germanic languages do from one another (take, say, English, Portuguese, and German). To say otherwise does a disservice to the truth of the situation -- some of these languages have probably been distinct from one another for millennia. It IS a common error, though, because almost all of the Chinese languages use most of the same written characters. -- DrHennessy ( talk) 21:23, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
Hello there, I think u’ve made a mistake about total number of speakers. The page has ignored people with Persian language as their second language and it’s kinda disrespectful to ignore those people. Total number of Persian speaking ppl is around 110 million and u can find the references under my edition of the page. So please go read the references before rewinding the page to the 55 million version. With considering Persian speakers population only as 55 million, you are ignoring Iranian kurds, Iranian Turkmens, Iranian Arabs, Iranian Baluchs, Iranian Azeris, Iranian Armenians, Iranian Georgians, Iranian Lurs, Iranian Bakhtiaris etc. all of these ethnicities speak Persian as their second language which is not considered by Wikipedia which may bring rage and hate against wikipedia. There are also other people in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Bahrain etc. who speak Persian as their second language. We don’t care if the unified source is complete or not. We just care about being considered in the numbers. So please respect us and consider us as people with their second language as Persian.
From a Bakhtiari minatory in Iran. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.115.18.69 ( talk • contribs) 22:59, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
pes
(Iranian Persian, following
their classification of Persian languages) is inaccurate you can send an email to
feedback@ethnologue.com and ask them to correct that.
Love —
LiliCharlie (
talk)
00:24, 20 February 2021 (UTC)Ethnologue has just released its 24th edition. However, they haven't updated yet the top 200 page. Does anyone have an account on Ethnologue to update the list? A455bcd9 ( talk) 17:02, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
Iran has a total population of 82 million people of all can speak Persian as their first or second language plus the population of Afghanistan 38 million and Tajikistan 9 million which all can speak "Iranian Persian" as their second language, the number of total speakers can't be only 74 million! 81.213.249.129 ( talk) 22:36, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
Some recent changes seem to have corrupted a lot of data. Implausible figures, wrong sums and doubtful to high and to low data. Who could check, I don't have access to appropriate data bases, thanks Ulrich Nillurcheier ( talk) 08:36, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
While you're at it, please correct language family and grouping information, ie. Polish is labeled as Balto-Slavic but Russian as Slavic, (when both are Slavic and members of BS group). I'm sure there are more of this mistakes there. 78.10.206.229 ( talk) 17:25, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
It claims the number of native English speakers is 300 million. However, the US population exceeds that, and then there is Canada, Great Britain, and what about India? One of its official languages is English, for crying out loud.
I just now got my account in order to register this complaint. I guess a more constructive thing to do would be to set the record straight. Maybe I will spend a little time this weekend on it. I just don't understand why somebody would bother to post clearly inaccurate figures ... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugenepete ( talk • contribs) 02:53, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but a lot of people in the USA aren't English native speakers. Whether you like it or not, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA have substantial immigrant populations with the USA having by far the most immigrants in the world at 50.6 million according to worldpopulationreview.com with Saudi Arabia at third place with 13.5 million and Germany at second place with 15.8 million (too lazy to swap places). Most of those immigrants don't speak English with Spanish being the second most common language in the USA by native speakers due to Mexico being the largest source of US immigrants. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.6.253.145 ( talk) 01:20, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
I don't understand why there is a separate row in the table for "total Chinese", surely this could be handled with an asterisk if the desire is to indicate that the Chinese speak multiple languages. This is a table of languages, and the row above clearly states "Mandarin" not "Chinese". Comparitvely countries with multiple languages like Switzerland, Canada, and the United States of America do not contain similar distinctions. 1durphul ( talk) 03:59, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
I assume that rounding should be eliminated, as it affects data accuracy. How alleged 166M of speakers of Russian could turn into 170M? How 203M speakers of Portueguese could turn into 200M? 4 millions of people matter!!! The rounding should be disabled, in my view. What are your opininon? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Suncatcher 13 ( talk • contribs) 16:50, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
240 (L1) plus 92 (L2), it must be 332 million in total (which gets it in the 6th place - between Hindi and French). Perhaps this record of the table should be corrected. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.114.30.30 ( talk • contribs) 07:40, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
Maybe that the number of mother tounge speakers are not that high, since many of the rural swahili speakers have a local tribal language which they learn to speak before they learn swahili, but, close to everybody in both Kenya, Tanzania and a huge number of Rwandans, Burundis, Ugandans and eastern DRC, speak swahili, they will easily pass 100 million, so it's more than strange, they are not on the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.227.81.60 ( talk) 21:05, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
As usual people on the ground are ignored but European or American are the ones who feel entitled to edit and omit when we know the truth that there could be more than 150m speakers Nlivataye ( talk) 11:25, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
And in Tanzania itself I currently know no one in the younger generation who doesn't speak Swahili as their first language and this in a country of 64 million people where 70% are below the age of 30 Nlivataye ( talk) 11:26, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Number of Turkish speakers should be in this list as well. Turkey's population is over 70 million just by itself. When you add Turks who live abroad (Germany, Belgium, Netherlands) and people who can speak Turkish (in the way it is spoken in Turkey) in some Turkic countries such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, Syria, Iraq, Iran then the number is easily over 100m. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.233.61.25 ( talk) 08:59, 24 March 2010 (UTC)
I think it was on the list in some previous version. Who deleted it? Quanstizium ( talk) 21:28, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
Entitled people who think they know all facts and don't even live in Turkey Nlivataye ( talk) 11:28, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Please listen to actual Swahili speakers in the region and many sources online. Tanzania is home to 64 million people and while there are hundreds of tribes and different other languages most now speak Swahili as their first language so Tanzania alone is enough to remove that bogus 16 million number for native speakers. Then there is Kenya another big second largest Swahili speaking country of 55 million which also have several tribes and languages but also largely speaks Swahili as their first language and the same for Eastern DRC which is almost half the country of 100 million and not to mention Other millions in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and substantial numbers in Zambia, Mozambique, Somalia, Comoros and Oman. So Native speakers should be at least around 50 million while second around 50 to 70 million and overall almost 200 million Nlivataye ( talk) 11:32, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
The Highest Estimation For Indonesian/Malay is lower than the Mode Average Estimation for just Indonesian. I know these lists are difficult - I'm just flagging it. -- Chriswaterguy talk 14:25, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
Ethnologue's estimates appear to be complete specious and impossible, as well. They claim 335 million English speakers as a first language. There are 316 million people in the USA, 63 million people in the UK, 35 million in Canada (28 million English speakers), 23 million in Australia, and another 9 million in Ireland and New Zealand (together). You see where this is going, right? Even if only 80% of those English-language speaking countries' populations actually speak English as a first language, it's still at least 350 million English speakers. My bet is the percentage is closer to 90% of the roughly 440 million residents of those countries (ignoring English as a first language speakers in the rest of world), or 395+ million. Ethnologue's estimate is thus off by a wide margin, especially on a so easily double-checked figure. 75.168.11.118 ( talk) 01:54, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
English was perhaps the most closely accurate portrayed language. Try Swahili which they claim native speakers are 16 million and overall 74m when native speakers are around 60 million and overall 200 million Nlivataye ( talk) 11:35, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
0 for Arabic? Are you guys serious? Hundreds of millions speak Arabic as their first language Nlivataye ( talk) 11:27, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
And you don't think that's bogus given English isn't classified as British English, American English, Australian English, Nigerian or Indian English? Nlivataye ( talk) 11:37, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
Ukrainian language article states there are 40 million native speakers and around 45 million total. This language should be in the list. I suspect there are parties who don't want this to be common knowledge. Anyway to add it back and prevent from removing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rumoku ( talk • contribs) 17:50, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
There is a serious problem with the all the data listed here in this arcticle due to two reasons: First: Survey years are not given. Second: Number of speakers should be put into perspective by also showing how large percentage did speakers of any particular language form in the year when the survey was taken, something like: 1. English 1,400 - 1,800 million; 23% - 30% of worlds population in 1997 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.131.29.94 ( talk) 05:00, 11 April 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to know if I'm counted in as an engrish speaker? Does my Maghrebi arabic include french? 88.195.46.112 ( talk) 04:52, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I don't understand the reason to state that figures for French include the Maghreb Area... It is right to say that the figure include French Creole because it is a variant of French but... the data include French-speaker of the 3 french-speaking (and it is French, not a variant of the language as a creole is) Maghreb states and rightly so...it doesn't mean anything... Easyboy82 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.222.27.206 ( talk) 21:58, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Where is Dutch? —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
85.144.100.44 (
talk)
16:48, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
German seems a little high at 229 million. The country of Germany only has about 82 million people, and Switzerland and Austria each have about 8 million. I'm not sure where the rest of the 130 million plus German speakers are supposed to come from. 70.176.120.225 ( talk) 07:05, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
Long time listener, first time caller: Given what appears to be many discrepancies listed below (especially, for example, Ukrainian) should Ethnologue be treated as a reliable source? NotYourLawyer ( talk) 22:25, 24 December 2022 (UTC)
This is very racist why Arabic not adding like a language it has more than 400 millions native speakers and they can understand each other even though they have different dialect but still same language they understand each other from country to contry that's super weird tha statistics in this article not fair and not valid in reality 77.232.123.20 ( talk) 22:05, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
There’s an error with the numbering. It shows the title as #1 instead of English. GamerKlim9716 ( talk) 07:51, 8 January 2023 (UTC)
Is there no better source available than paywall protected Ethnologue. Readers of this article are not able to view the remainder of the top 200 spoken languages. Paywall sources really shouldn't be used on wikipedia. Blario ( talk) 22:44, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
Being behind a paywall is not a big problem, far worse is how poor Ethnologue generally is (as a reminder, it is originally a Christian evangelical outreach and not an academic institution). However, it's often the only thing we have. If someone said no information is better than wrong information, I'd be willing to lend an ear and have this article deleted. It's not flat out wrong but it's not really reliable either. Jeppiz ( talk) 23:12, 13 February 2023 (UTC)
09:52, 12 March 2023 94.109.1.221 talk 18,045 bytes −6 No edit summary undo Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit
This edit changed "Standard German" to "German Language" and added about 50M speakers. The reference link provided (
https://www.ethnologue.com/25/language/deu) is not accessible (behind paywall?). "German Language" cannot be found at
https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/, therefore does not represent the source of the section well; also it cannot be found through Ethnologue website's search function. Should this edit be reverted?
Υφ22 (
talk) 03:24, 20 March 2023 (UTC) --
Υφ22 (
talk)
03:25, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
According to the Wikipedia article, 44 mln speakers (L1+L2) of the Uzbek language exist! Therefore, the Uzbek language should come in 40-41th place on this (first) list! 145.118.206.222 ( talk) 09:30, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I have noticed aa critical flaw in this list related to Punjabi, which is subdivided into Eastern and Western Punjabi, which themselves are families of dialects and not a language. Instead there should be just one category "Punjabic", which actually is the language consisting of dialects or languages. If that is not possible the there should be Punjabi, Hindko, Saraiki, Pothohari, etc. PeoplesRepublicOfChina01 ( talk) 11:02, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
Could anyone who has access to their paywalled data update the list based on the Ethnologue 2023 figures? The List of languages by number of native speakers is already up-to-date, but not yet this article.
Also, I notice that their own top 200 list apparently hasn't been updated for 2023 yet, even though that edition has apparently been available for some time – a bit strange. Krissie ( talk) 13:28, 20 August 2023 (UTC)