Talk:Linguistic demography

Summary table

One of the most stupid list that I ever saw, the other is the list of countries by date of nationhood.. I occasionaly look at it and this this guy really need some statistical classes! How can you compare a language with one result to another with 6? etc. -Pedro 23:06, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Ethnologue

I would suggest removing the Ethnologue table. Unfortunately Ethnologue is a rather unreliable source, they make significant mistakes even for rather large languages, not to mention many smaller ones.

General

If you click on the Hindi link, it says 480 million speakers and ranked 2nd which seems to conflict with this page.

Are these native speakers or all speakers ?

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That depends on how a language is defined. I used the http://www.ethnologue.com as source. I quote from this website : Modern Standard Arabic is a modernized variety of Classical Arabic. In most Arab countries only the well educated have adequate proficiency in Standard Arabic, while over 100,500,000 do not. Donar Reiskoffer 07:32, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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2002 Statistics (from German Wiki)

German Wikipedia seems to have more recent 2002 statistics, though these do suggest that Mandarin has decreased by 90 million speakers in 8 years - this does suggest conflict. I hope English speakers can deduce the meaning, if not ask me for a brief translation. (Stand means Position)

"Stand" here means "as of", i.e. the numbers are current as of 2002. And the table notes that it "is based on ethnic affiliation", i.e. membership in a certain ethnic group, rather than a census of speakers of the language. -- pne 14:12, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Die folgende Tabelle beruht auf der Angabe der Volkszugehörigkeit (Stand: 2002):

• Chinesische Sprache (Mandarin), mind. 800 Mio. Sprecher
• Spanische Sprache, 360 Mio. Sprecher
• Englische Sprache, 325 Mio. Sprecher
• Hindi, 300 Mio. Sprecher
• Arabische Sprache, 220 Mio. Sprecher
• Bengalische Sprache, 190 Mio. Sprecher
• Portugiesische Sprache, ca. 180 Mio. Sprecher
• Russische Sprache, 170 Mio. Sprecher
• Japanische Sprache, 127 Mio Sprecher
• Deutsche Sprache, 98 Mio. Sprecher
• Koreanische Sprache, 78 Mio. Sprecher
• Französische Sprache, 77 Mio. Sprecher
• Koreanische Sprache, 70 Mio Sprecher
• Französische Sprache, ca. 70 Mio Sprecher
• Vietnamesische Sprache, 70 Mio Sprecher
• Italienische Sprache, 70 Mio Sprecher
• Polnische Sprache, fast 40 Mio Sprecher
• Indonesische Sprache
• Thailändische Sprache

The Swedish Wiki also has a beautiful table: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_%F6ver_mest_talade_spr%E5k I do not, however, speak Swedish - and so do not understand what the names of some languages refer to.

--OldakQuill 13:35, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Arabic

Whatever happened to the more than 100 million people who were supposed to speak Arabic? I don't see Arabic on this list.

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Cema: I see Arabic, but in the list of countries, and Israel is not listed, even though more than 18% of Israelis speak Arabic. I will add it to the table. Cema 00:21, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Cema: Oops, it is coming from Ethnologue. Can I still add it? Obviously Ethnologue data are incomplete. Cema 00:23, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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There are no native speakers of Standard Arabic as defined by Ethnologue [1]. The table is incorrect. However one personally defines Arabic, Ethnologue sees a single standard, literary language taught in schools and used in formal situations (i.e. not anyone's native language), which it calls Standard Arabic, and a set of spoken informal languages spoken in daily life, which it calls Egyptian Spoken Arabic, Algerian Spoken Arabic, etc. --Cam 22:29, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

• I edited the article and list a little to show this. --Cam 00:09, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

English

The rank given in this page and the one in English language page is totally contradicting (see, Talk:English language). I haven't yet looked at other languages, but it seems people are trying edit war on these pages. Also, it sounds to be bit chauvinistic--which should be avoided here.--Rrjanbiah 05:56, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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In response to User:Rrjanbiah on his comments in Talk:English_language (I think here is more appropriate for the discussion) - an edit war would be unfortunate, but these people have a valid point, so I am researching the matter more fully, with the results below.

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I just reverted the numbers in the table to what they actually are if you follow the links at the bottom of the table. Someone has artificially inflated the numbers relating to English. All numbers are now consistent with what you find in the references they point to, which brings English back to just a hair behind Spanish, but behind it nevertheless. Ramdrake 15:15, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

"The world is not so anglicanized has one might think." - I find that the opposite is true, i.e. more people speak English than is realised by certain communities who have large numbers and hence have no major need for English. Blackcarr 08:41, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

That's true. That's why in South America Brazil they shifted to Spanish and Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay to Portuguese. But the world is really not so anglicanized. I consider myself as a not good English speaker, but I speak English much better than most Portuguese or Spanish. Pedro 17:41, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It seems quite obvious that someone is trying to inflate the number of English speakers. The fact that 47% of the EU speak English is rather irrelevant. A large percentage of the EU speak German, French and/or Spanish as well. I speak those languages myself, but I would definitely not accept being counted as an English speaker (or a Spanish, German or French speaker).

Sources

EU

EU website - 47% of the EU speak English. Overall, 89% of EU pupils learn English.
EU Eurostat website - Jan 1st 2004 population of EU = 380.8 million.
UK Government - UK population = 58.8 million.
Ireland 2004 EU Presidency - population of Ireland > 3.9 million.
Primary: 58 + 3.9 = 62.7 million.
Secondary: 31% of EU = 118 million.
Total: 180.7 million speak English.

OK so I see these figures, but still I wonder, the table seems to bew data from the 1990s, now if you look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population

you will see data frm the 2005 EUROBAROMETER (now probably in EU figures have gone up by 10% since then for English speakers). There is a list of first and second language speakers. In my experience there almost all foreigners will speak English in mixed ethnic groupings in Europe, now a one week tra8ining course is different from moving to permanently live abroad, the mother tongue / native speaker thing is a myth and not useful for actually recording language use. Wikipedia could better explain this and also cross ref links so that for each language page there is common format for NATIVE SPEAKERS, L2 speakers and L3 speakers. Then each language page is responsible for updating the data, not basing it in bogus criteria such as ethnic Chinese in Thailand must speak Chinese and not Thai, or out of date population extrapolations % of speakers, such as with German. Also it seems stranmge to exclude speakers under the age of 15, the demographics of much of the world mean large numbers of under 15s in some countries and not others. Surely at school enrolment age (7 or 5) its known what language people speak in order to teach them, is this not a better age to take the figures from? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.197.74.75 (talk) 20:07, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

USA

US census
Primary: 215.4 million.
Secondary: 36 million speak English well or better.
Total: 245.4 million.

Canada

Canadian Office of Commissioner of official languages
Primary: 20.9 million.
Secondary: ?
Total: 20.9 million.

Australia

AusStats
Total: 20 million.

New Zealand

NZ Government
Total: 4 million.

South Africa

SA Census
Primary: 3.7 million.
Secondary: ?
Total: 3.7 million

India

This is a difficult one to calculate, as there are no hard facts.
CIA Factbook Population: 1,049,700,118 (July 2003 est.)
University College London - Estimates of the total number of speakers of English in India vary from around 4-20 percent of the population.
Taking the lowest estimate: 4%,
Total: 42 million.

Other Countries

Malaysia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Liberia (40% of pop).

Total

516.7 million

Links

[2]

Conclusion

This number is vastly different from the one published.
So I think to satisfy all people there should be 2 lists here - one for primary speakers and one for total number of speakers.

Blackcarr 09:21, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Good work Blackcarr! --Rrjanbiah 06:42, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

its wrong to every data. They also say that there are 170 million mother-tongue Portuguese spekers when Brazil alone as 180 million. I've seen the list of 2000.link

an it as: 1- Chinese- Mandarin 2- Hindi 3- Spanish 4- English 5- Bengali 6- Portuguese 7- Russian 8- Japanese 9- German 10- Chinese - Wu

Speakers as a second language is a very hard thing to see, in every language. At school we (my country) must learn at least 2 languages. I speak 5 and I can work in some other 3. I consider Second and learning language as two different things. Capeverdians for example are bilingual and speak Portuguese as a second language and Crioulo as first. They speak Portuguese has they were natives, and Crioulo much the same. I cant speak English as I were a native.

Portuguese is the most Popular learning language in: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Senegal. Is the second language of Mozambique (40% speak it, 9% mother-tongue) and Cape Verde (80% speak it, very few as mother-tongue) and it is becoming in East Timor. I estimated as minimum mother-tongue speaks between 200 million to 220 million. As second and learning language is impossible to say.Pedro 17:31, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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German

It is not correct to only list speakers of Standard German as speakers of "German". According to http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=GER, this does only include native speakers of standard German. There are many other German dialects. According to most sources, the total number of native speakers of German is currently between 120 and 125 Million. See for instance http://www.goethe.de/uk/chi/werbung/german4U.pdf : A language spoken by 120 million people or a quarter of all Europeans as their mother tongue., http://faculty.fairfield.edu/IBgoldfield/why_german.htm, http://www.aquinas.edu/languages/german/whystudygerman.html : Over 120 million people speak German as their native language. -- Nico 19:16, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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You have chosen some very unreliable sources in order to proof your changes. These sources are just advertisement from language departments and do not contain reliable statistics. Serious statistics indicate 98 million native speakers of German worldwide.

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Goethe-Institut unreliable? Btw, I haven't "chosen" a source, I am not able to find any source which not says 120 or over 120 million. This search (120+million+german+(speak OR spoken)): [3] gives 62,100 Google hits. Nico 00:14, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Greek

Why the Greek language is not included in the list? Optim 17:39, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Feel free to extend this list with the 25 most spoken languages. The Greek language is only at rank 74 Donar Reiskoffer 16:06, 4 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Italian

What about Italian? There are about 58 million people in Italy. Blackcarr 10:04, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Spanish

A list of Spanish speaking countries with associated numbers. Blackcarr 09:44, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Portuguese is more spoken than Russian

Portuguese has at minimum 190 million first language speakers. I calculated base on Statistics (real ones) that there are 199 millions. If counted Galician 202 million. While Russian is decreasing, many of them are not first language, but second. If counting bilingual people, Portuguese has 207 million - 210 million (counting Galician) using the population of CIA. but using linguistics statistics of each country. -Pedro 23:22, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

You may be correct. CIA - The World Factbook -- World lists 'Portuguese 2.63%, Russian 2.75%', but maybe it should read 'Portuguese 2.75%, Russian 2.63%'. Pædia 17:11, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

• its impossible that portuguese has only 170 million, when the population of Brazil alone has a population bigger than that! Adding the 10 million in Portugal and the 7.5 million in Angola. And the 1,5 million in Mozambique (only counting people that uses only Portuguese). If we count bilingual (not people that use the language has a foreign language like me) this number increase even more! These lists are very unreliable. Pedro 20:00, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

These data are undoubtedly out-of-date. Boraczek 10:38, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thai in top 30

If you would check the Wikipedia page on Thailand, you would notice that it has a population of 62,354,402; yet, when I check the links below,it says that there are around 20,000,000 Thai speakers. How is it that only one third of the nation knows the official language? If the statistics I submitted are correct, that should place it above Vietnamese, or at least above Turkish. 1:00, 6 Sep 2004 (PST)

20,000,000 is meant to be the number of native Thai speakers as of 1996. The Thai ethnic group only comprises a half of the population of Thailand and this is why only a half of the inhabitants of Thailand are counted as native speakers of Thai. Boraczek 10:35, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The 20-million-speaker number is promoted by Ethnologue, a language authority which tends controversially to treat some local dialects as languages in their own right. Ethnologue's bias is based on its penchant to link language with ethnicity. In other words, Ethnologue has a political agenda. It treats Thai language as "central Thai" - meaning that it assumes only the Thais who live in the central region are native speakers. It has not updated that number since 2000. Also it treats Isaan Thai and northern Thai people as folks belonging to different ethnicity. This is completely false because, first, central Thai is also the native dialect in most of the southern, the western and the eastern part of of Thailand. On that factual basis, the number of native speakers of Central Thai should be at least 32 millions. Secondly, many Thai in the east and northeast (Isaan) are bilingual - meaning they grow up speaking Central Thai just as much as their native dialects. All things considered, the total number of native speakers of Thai, as of 2017, is about 44-45 million speakers. Thucydides49 09:20 PM, Nov. 29, 2017.

-Actually, about 75% of Thai residents are ethnic Thai. This would imply that they speak Thai as their first language. The most significant minority is the Chinese, who make up 14% of the population. ---dcb11duke

In many countries there are important minorities who don't speak the national language

E.g. in Spain you really need to discount the Catalans, the Basques and the Galicians. On the other hand Mexico is growing fastly so that it doesn't really matter. In Latin America there are a lot of native tongues. Don't score them all for Spanish. In Germany there are only about 73 million Germans. The rest are non-german immigrants.

Bengali

Actually, the latest Ethnologue figures indicate that Bengali has 207 million native speakers. Of course, I don't know how this affects Bengali's ranking overall, but we could cross-reference Ethnologue's updated figures for the other languages with the CIA FactBook and other sources, I suppose.

... for bengali: A language of Bangladesh

ISO/DIS 639-3: ben Population 100,000,000 in Bangladesh (1994 UBS). 211,000,000 including second-language speakers (1999 WA). Population total all countries: 171,070,202. 171 Mi - 211 Mi But we need a better source for that. At least for the case of Portuguese the numbers are laughable. It does not even include the number of Speakers in Brazil. -Pedro 19:16, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This table is incorrect

About Portuguese, the table ranks it 7th with 170 million speakers. Just in Brazil are 180 million people and they all speak Portuguese, plus Portugal (10 million) and Portuguese living abroad (estimated another million at least), Angola and Mozambique and other former Portuguese colonies, makes at least 200 million. muriel@pt 11:59, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Please notice that the table contains estimates as of 1995. Boraczek 12:55, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

the lowest number of native speakers for Portuguese is more than 208 million. Second language is more than 217 million. I'm waiting the update for Bengali and hindi to correct the info, because it would change the ranking, but is very likely that Portuguese is more spoken than Bengali. -Pedro 19:19, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Simplifying Ethnologue table

What do you guys think about removing the "Countries with more than 1% as native speakers" column, or breaking it onto its own page? Right now it seems inconsistent. --Arcadian 12:50, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Punjabi Language Speakers

It appears that the Punjabi language speakers figures is grossly wrong. Punjabi is spoken by somewhere between 75-100 million people. This is split between Eastern and Western Punjabi (both the same languages, but they use different written scripts).

[4] [5]

Also, if Singapore and Kenya are listed as having populations of Punjabi speakers (approx 10k each) then surely the UK, USA and Canada should also be included? They have perhaps hundreds of thousands of Punjabi speakers (Indian diaspora).

Sukh 18:31, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Further investigations have revealed that the latest Pakistani Census shows 58,433,531 first language speakers of Punjabi. There are plenty more second language speakers. In India, the figure is 23,378,744 although I couldn't find figures for the 2001 census (I'm not sure if they've been released). That puts the figure at at LEAST 80 million. I'd put the figure closer to 100 million because due to political reasons, the number of Punjabi speakers in India tends to be understated. This does not include Diaspora speakers where you could be looking at 500,000 in the UK and 500,000 in Canada alone. Sources: [6] [7] [8] Sukh 17:23, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Some of the figures in the Ethnologue table are very old. I think it's fair to update them as the user sees fit, if he/she can point to good sources as you have. I humbly recommend footnoting where your numbers differ from the original Ethnologue figures or language definitions. So IMHO go ahead and boldly edit, just maybe show what you're changing and why.

By the way, I have just noticed that Ethnologue has a new 15th edition online with new estimates!!! It gives 60.8 million for Western Panjabi [9] and 28 million for Eastern Panjabi [10] (both include diasporas I guess). The Western estimate is for the year 2000 but the Eastern figure is based partly on the 1991 Indian census, so I think the total for both would be approaching 100 million by now. Regards, Cam 23:54, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

Ethnologue Table: Confusion between Spanish and English

If you visit Ethnologue for Spanish and English, you'll find:

English: 341 million native speakers

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ENG

Spanish: 322-358 million native speakers

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ENG

According to other sources, English should go before Spanish in this Table, putting correct numbers

• The figures in the table are based on Ethnologue's 1999 listing of the top 100. The numbers published on the site may be different now. If you change the table please add a footnote. --Cam 18:21, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)
• There's confusion about every language and with very difference numbers. -Pedro 21:49, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

World Almanac 2005

I don't have access to the book right now, but those figures can't be for native speakers. The high figures for Mandarin, Russian, and Malay-Indonesian show that this must be a matter of total speakers. --Cam 06:37, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)

• lets face it, the data from that sources are incorrect. I think we should make our own data, because there are people in each language that know, in a very good extent the numbers of the language.
• I think we can use the table of Ethnologue and update with the info we have. I really want to update it, it has gross information, but the table is cool. We delete the rest, and keep the layout, and edit it with what we have on the articles. -Pedro 21:17, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Countries

case of German: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Paraguay, Poland, Switzerland, United States, Uruguay (18 countries)

I dont believe that in some of these countries there is more than 1 % of speakers, in some i believe it is close to 0% not even reaching the 0,1%. It surely states ancient German emigration.-Pedro 19:25, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I actually went through the new online Ethnologue and confirmed these. For all of these countries, Ethnologue gives a number of native speakers of a German dialect (including Alemannisch, Schwyzerdutsch, etc) that is about 1% or greater than the total population of the country. --Cam 21:36, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

• Ethnologue for Angola states of about 56,000 first lang. Portuguese speakers, when there are millions. Some can only say a "couple" of words in tribal languages (most of that words are now even part of Portuguese). They base their linguistic clames mainly on ethnicity... there is less than 1% of other languages than Portuguese in Brazil for instance, the Italian being the main, with at least a third of that value distributed to Amerindians. Well at least the source I saw some time ago. Surely the same occurs in the rest of South America. The best, is for you to search info of that countries rather than basing it in Ethnologue. They deal with to much languages, you can deal only with German for instance. The listed countries in Ethnologue are the ones with more than 1% of speakers? for sure? I'm not saying their data is incorrect, I also use it, but mostly for comparison. Hugs, cam. -Pedro 23:08, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pedro, are you saying there are millions of people in Angola whose native language is Portuguese? They were speaking Portuguese when they were two years old? I think we may be dealing with different definitions of "native speaker". --Cam 06:11, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

• yups, it is their native language. Including their parents'. Younger people can't speak other languages. Often their parents do. Some also don't. This occurs in the costal areas, while in the interior, people are often bilingual or monolingual (tribal languages). But I also considering native people who used another language while kids and adults they dont speak it anymore (it is also very common) - it occurs with children that lost their parents and moved to Luanda. "I" unserstand has native has the main language used at home and outside. -Pedro 13:33, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Chinese

Many of the Ethnologue estimates for the varieties of Chinese are based on 1984 data. I crudely projected those forward to 1999 based on the U.S. Census Bureau's estimates of China's population for 1984 (1042.8 mln) and 1999 (1260.1 mln), that is, I multiplied by 1.21. I will add footnotes eventually (though maybe we should drop the notes? It could get pretty cluttered there). --Cam 06:17, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

I thought Wikipedia is not about original research? A-giau 05:06, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Arabic

Arabic, Standard [11]

A language of Saudi Arabia

ISO/DIS 639-3: arb Population 206,000,000 first-language speakers of all Arabic varieties (1999 WA). Region Middle East, North Africa, other Muslim countries. Also spoken in Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. Alternate names High Arabic, Al Fus-Ha, Al Arabiya Dialects Modern Standard Arabic (Modern Literary Arabic), Classical Arabic (Koranic Arabic, Quranic Arabic). Preserves the ancient grammar. Classification Afro-Asiatic, Semitic, Central, South, Arabic Language use National language. 246,000,000 second-language speakers of all Arabic varieties (1999 WA). Not a first language. Used for education, official purposes, written materials, and formal speeches. Classical Arabic is used for religion and ceremonial purposes, having archaic vocabulary. Modern Standard Arabic is a modernized variety of Classical Arabic. In most Arab countries only the well educated have adequate proficiency in Standard Arabic, while over 100,500,000 do not. Language development Arabic script in Algeria. Newspapers. Radio programs. Dictionary. Bible: 1984–1991.

why does this article consider Arabic has having more than 200 million native speakers, when most does not consider it? This situation is extremely similar to Latin in the middle ages. Some spoke Latin (for church and educational porpouses) and was the official language, while the majority of the population spoke a derived language. Church was in Latin until very recently. -Pedro 10:46, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Please state why Arabic should be kept has it is in the article. Because if Arabic is one, also Chinese is one. -Pedro 23:23, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Exactly... Arabic is one language, but Chinese isn't? Isn't that a double standard? -- ran (talk) 23:39, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

I don't see your point here. Modern Standard Arabic is used in the media including television and newspapers. It's used in schools and speeches. It's used for reading and writing (you can't read or write colloqial Arabic). It's used for religious ceremonies both Muslim and Christian. It's understood by ALL Arabic speakers, although some have a varying degree of literacy. Yuber 13:39, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As Pedro indicates below, the table as it now stands shows native speakers of languages. I don't think MSA is considered to have native speakers. Can ordinary five- and six-year-olds (not prodigies) speak it fluently?

I think, rather than making the difficult argument that MSA itself is a native language, one could argue that all of the varieties of "Arabic" spoken natively by people should be grouped together in the table as one native language, called Arabic. This avoids the MSA nativeness problem. However, then it would seem inconsistent to split the "varieties of Chinese". And similarly with Hindi (an often-used broader definition of Hindi includes speakers of Maithili, Awadhi, etc.) --Cam 16:34, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

• Yuber plz stop removing the changes, you dont need to remove everything just to put Arabic. But chinese also shares a single writing system. Most writing of Latin languages are inteligible. Does that occur in all countries? Do they speak it has their native language. As I asked before, is this issue international ignorance or Arabic is just one language with various dialects? Or various related languages? That is what process occured? The fact, that many understand doesnt mean that Standard Arabic is their native languages, in here, we are discussing NATIVE languages. It is possible for a Moroccan living in Egypt, not having problems in talking the way he used to talk and to be understood? Obviously not being understood doesnt explain much. What do MOST linguists think about this issue? We know there are "excelent" linguists out there. What are the changes between the Arabic dialects, where they come from? For instance most cape Verdeans speak Portuguese as they were natives, but their native language is a Portuguese Creole. What process occured in the Arabic nations? Are the spoken forms varieties/dialects of the same language or languages? Please put the page how it was, if you want to add arabic do it and discuss why. If you dont I'll do it. -Pedro 14:06, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Table changes

As the estimates in the table are getting (and will get) increasingly different from Ethnologue, I changed the title. I also split Arabic. As discussed above, this brings it in line with the treatment of Chinese. Further, I removed footnotes that only related to number of speakers, not language definitions. (Ethnologue now counts 61.5 million native Italian speakers; speakers of Sicilian, Venetian, etc. are "native bilinguals".) Removed Dutch which has 17.4 million in latest Ethnologue. --Cam 02:37, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)

• I think we should have the 50 most spoken, that is if that is not a problem. Dutch is an important language, official language in more than one country, and if it in TOP 50, we should manage to write about it. BTW, the problem of Arabic and Chinese: do most linguists agree these spoken forms are in fact different languages? I've heard that some Chinese communicate "drawing" Chinese characters in the hand with a finger. How Arabs from different countries communicate? And what about countries that share a border? I'm not talking about TV or newspapers. It is possible for a Maroccan to talk with an Egyptian? What happens with a Maroccan living 3 months in Egypt? Overall, I agree with your changes. Especially the name of the table. I'll only update the number of speakers of port. when the others with similar number: hindi and Bengali is updated. -Pedro 16:59, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Dutch

it seems that dutch was added not with numbers of speakers in the Netherlands and Belgium but the population, both the netherlands and Belgium have a lot of inmigrants, I believe...-Pedro 19:01, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Problem of Hindi, Portuguese and Bengali

Bengali seems overestimated, Hindi and Portuguese underestimated, what to do? The value for Portuguese doesnt even comprehends the native speakers in Brazil. And out of Brazil there are more than 20 million who use it has first language. It would be useful if there would be an Indian estimative on native speakers of Hindi on India. In a country with more than a thousand of million inhabitants... I would except more than 182 mi. What are the states in India that use Hindi has a native language? And what's their population? -Pedro 13:58, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Russian Langauge

Russian Lanaguage total speakers you have written 285 million yet in the rank it says only 145 million ??? can you explain why, is ita inconsistantcy or something?

Thanks CooldogCongo

Percent of Mandarin in Canada

I would have to say that theres got to be enough Mandarin speakers in Canada for it to be included. Remember, that only needs about 350,000 speakers, and there are a lot of Chinese in Vancouver and Toronto. This should be looked up, as it is highly likely Canada has 1% of its people speaking Mandarin. Kaiser Matias 21:24 6 May 2005 (UTC)

It is very possible. In the 2001 census 2.9% of Canadians (872,400) reported "Chinese" as their mother tongue. A significant majority of these are Cantonese speakers (sorry no cites right now) so Cantonese definitely gets over 1%. Mandarin-speakers may make up enough of the remainder to be over 1% of Canadians. Cam 16:54, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

Summary table

I'd like to move the summary table to the top of the page, since that seems to be the most objective synthesis of information we're likely to have (having Ethnologue at the top is leading to unnecessary fights). I'll make that move in a few days, unless I hear some objections. --Arcadian 15:03, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

It seems that the median values are calculated with WAN and not without. Also Arabic and Bengali are reversed. I modify according. --ArséniureDeGallium 14:30, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Chinese has 937 million speakers?

Considering that 92% of China's 1.3 billion people are Han Chinese, this is completely not believable. -- ran (talk) 21:36, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)

Rename?

Since this article is basically a list of data sources for List of languages by number of native speakers, shouldn't we rename it to reflect its function? kwami 04:56, 2005 August 25 (UTC)

It's been a week without comment. I'll rename this "Language speaker data". kwami 19:23, 2005 September 2 (UTC)

Restored page

Someone had decided that this should be a redirect to List of languages by number of native speakers. But the information is not the same. So I restored it. --Alvestrand 16:11, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

WP:SYN

This article is compeltely flawed. It should be a referenced discussion of linguistic demographics. Instead it inexpertly cobbles together flawed averages. What is the point of calculating the median of various estimates of speakers of Khariboli, Hindi as defined by the India census and Hindustani in general? Worthless. The article also contained self-references that would make the page appropriate in Talk: namespace. At present, this should be merged somewhere. dab (𒁳) 15:28, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

"Influential languages" chart

I have nominated File:World Economy languages.png, the chart of "influential languages" by population and GDP, for deletion at Wikimedia Commons. The deletion discussion is here. Cnilep (talk) 02:35, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

The chart, "Most Influential Languages in the World Economy" presents original research by User:Crossswords. As Crosswords details at Wikimedia Commons, "i added vague assumptions taking the most reasonble countries, [...] It was not easy deciding what belongs to what. Many regions simple lack informationof their gdp, some regions likq quebec where easy some i had to leave out like french speaking party of belgium." In short, the user synthesized information from two published reports with "vague assumptions" about languages and states to create original research. The chart is therefore out of scope for Wikipedia, and should be removed. Cnilep (talk) 00:55, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Languages don't have economies, which is basically what the chart is saying. — kwami (talk) 05:48, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

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