Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

Contents

[edit] Russian

the number of Russian speakers is much higher due to the fact that in the soviet times there were 300M citizens and they were all educated in russian! another 100M + studied and were able to speak in this language. it is highly unreasonable to have just 145M first language speaker, we are talking about language and not ethnicity there are 143M russians in russia (and they all speak in russian) plus 20M russian speakers in Ukraine (all ukrainians know russian - 46M) and all the belarussians speak in russian (10M) millions of russian speakers as a first language in central Asia and so on... http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm test


add up your proposed figures and they're still well below the figure given in the article. the number of second language speakers for many languages do look low but that more indicates that the CIA/WA sources have strict standards of fluency to classify as a second language rather than any errors Veridis 07:20, 1 October 2006 (UTC)


it is highly unreasonable to have just 145M first language speaker, we are talking about language and not ethnicity there are 143M russians in russia (and they all speak in russian)

the 143M russians in russia include kids not yet able to speak & infants, also leave a margin for the dumb, unless its suggested that an year old russian baby is fluent in russian!!

[edit] French, Tamil, again

1. French is indeed official in the new states I added. Before reverting, double-check things.

I did check.
Which country exactly is wrong? You revert without any explanation or justification.
All of them, according to the World Almanac, Ethnologue, CIA Factbook, and even the French (and English) Wikipedia articles on the French language.
I added Dominica, Saint Lucia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Mauritania. French is an official language in these countries. It is not the only official languages, but it is one of two official languages (alongside English or Arabic).
French Wikipedia, Ethnologue, and the CIA Factbook all disagree with you. Not that any of them are reliable sources, but I'm unable to verify your claims. kwami 06:32, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

2. If we don't list territories, then we don't reflect the actual geographical spread of the language. New Caledonia is not metropolitan France. They are 11,000 miles apart!

New Caledonia was already included.
New Caledonia was not mentioned. Do you read the list sometimes instead of merely reverting people?
"France (including territories)" obviously includes New Caledonia. This is how countries are listed for all other languages.
France is the country with the most overseas territories in the world, so just mentioning "including territories" is giving very poor information indeed. Instead of deleting the French overseas territories, add the overseas territories to other languages where appropriate.
This article is already too long. We don't list every Russian republic where Russian is official either. kwami 06:32, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

3. The total number I give is not everybody who has studied French. The total number of people who have studied French at some point in their life is around 500 million (as of 2000), as explained here.

My bad.

4. You wrote: "The article appears to be an attempt to make French look as important as possible rather than give a straight-forward account." That's a very weak argument sir. The University of Laval website is a very rigorous one, and actually I tend to find that they underestimate the number of Francophones in Africa.

Their figure is far higher than others I've seen. If the site were rigorous, in would provide references.

5. Before reverting straight away genuine people contributing to the list, you'd rather check some of the very exagerated numbers already in the list. For instance, the list says that there are 101 million native speakers of German. Well, actually, there are tens of millions of people in Germany who are not native speakers of German. They are native speakers of dialects (Bavarian, Franconian, and so on). Yet they are listed as "native German speakers" here. Why don't you have anything to say about that?

That figure in within the range of most sources. I'd be happy to change it, though, if you can demonstrate that it's exaggerated.

On the other hand, the number of French speakers was ludicrously understimated in the list. Some people have already expressed negative comments about that in the talk page. You should read it. Hardouin 12:48, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

I have. Much of the objection is based on the ULaval web site you used. That source is a statistical outlier and needs published confirmation. kwami 13:06, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
A statistical outlier? You must be joking. You should read État de la francophonie dans le monde, published by the Haut-Conseil de la Francophonie in 1998.
Listen, you don't "own" this list, and if you keep reverting faithfull editors I will refer this to some admins. Hardouin 13:27, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Go ahead. If we come to an agreement on your claims, great. Meanwhile, this is a cooperative enterprise, not a free-for-all. BTW, I've gotten into the same kind of argument over English, so I'm not picking on French.
We may have a real conflict between two sets of sources, in which case we should list both. But let's get some feedback. I can't believe the world is this igorant about French! kwami 20:39, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
People have this tendency to underestimate the number of French speakers in Africa, as if Black Africans and Arabs could only be native speakers of Arabic or African languages, as if millions of people in Africa were not natively bilinguals. That's probably where the discrepancy comes from. Hardouin 22:37, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
In two years in Francophone Africa (Benin [the "Quartier latin" of West Africa], Togo, Burkina, Mali, Niger), everyone I knew learned French in school. Elementary education was in the local language for just that reason, and French was introduced over several years. Not that people's French wasn't excellent, but it was still a second language. Of course, I'm not saying I couldn't have missed a hundred million people! kwami 02:59, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Kwami, I'm sorry but your figure for French speakers is absolutely ridiculous. You simply take the 63 million French citizens and add to them the 4 million French-speaking Belgian citizens and you already have 67 million French speakers, which means more than the 65 million people mentionned on the page. Afterwards, you simply cannot consider there are no native French speakers neither in Switzerland, nor in Quebec, nor in the Middle East, nor in Africa. To sum it up, that 65 million French speakers figure is such a joke that absolutely no one can take it seriously. Metropolitan 00:39, 27 April 2006 (UTC).

Those countries were all accounted for, as you can see above. Ethnologue has 65M for all countries. Not that Ethn. is the best source, but the discrepancy needs to be addressed. kwami 02:59, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Kwami, I'm sorry but there are native French speakers in Africa. The elites in North Africa speak both French and Arabic to their children since birth. In Ivory Coast, a good friend of mine from over there was explaining to me that a large part of the population, including lower classes, speak French to their children from birth, either because they think it is better for their future or because the parents are from different ethnicities and have different native tongues, and so they use French at home for communication. There are millions of native French speakers there. Same in Gabon. In Togo and Benin there are also many native French speakers. In Burkina, Mali and Niger the influence of French is much less strong, so it is not surprising that you have met only second language learners there. All in all, the 109 million figure is much more credible than the 65 million figure (not to mention the native French speakers in Lebanon, Mexico (ever heard of the French Basque community in Mexico?), Colombia (ever heard of Ingrid Betancourt?), or Argentina). Just counting the native speakers of metropolitan France, overseas France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, US, plus French citizens living abroad, I reach a total of 78 million native speakers. Then 30 million more across North Africa, Black Africa, and the rest of the world doesn't seem exagerated to me. As of 2005 there are 305 million people living in francophone Africa alone. Even assuming very low rates of native French speakers, that would still yield millions of native speakers. Hardouin 11:28, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Disregarding Africa for the moment, the numbers of native French speakers outside France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, USA is pretty small. In fact, the French territories in America have quite small numbers as well. That means 45M native speakers in Francophone Africa, or 15% of the population. While certainly possible, I'd like some verification.
Let's list both figures. Hopefully that will spur someone to straighten this all out. kwami 06:32, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
The French gov't site you referenced for the total number of speakers has "close to" 119M ("langue maternelle ou d’usage courant"), not the 264M you reported, so I corrected it. That doesn't square with your other source (109M "véritables francophones", evidently meaning the same thing as "langue maternelle"), which I continue to suspect is exaggerated. kwami 07:07, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Counting only the native French speakers of Europe and North America:
  • 90% of people in metropolitan France (as per latest language survey at the 1999 French census): 0.9 * 61 = 54.9 million
  • overseas France, I roughly estimate one-third native French speakers (low estimate): 1/3 * 2.5 = 0.83 million
  • French citizens living abroad: 2 million
  • 41% of people in Belgium: 0.41 * 10.44 = 4.3 million
  • 19.2% of people in Switzerland: 0.192 * 7.5 = 1.44 million
  • 6,864,615 native French speakers in Canada (2001 Canada census)
  • 1,643,838 people who speak French at home in the US (2000 census). The actual number of native French speakers in the US is higher, but US Census only report languages spoken at home, not mother tongues, so we can only use that 1,643,838 figure.
That yields a grand total of: 54.9 + 0.83 + 2 + 4.3 + 1.44 + 6,864,615 + 1,643,838 = 72 million. Then to reach the 109 million figure listed by the University of Laval, you only need 37 million more native French speakers in North Africa, Black Africa, Latin American, Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. That doesn't seem far-fetched.
Also please note that mother tongue statistics grossly underestimate the actual spread of French. In metropolitan France there are 90% people who are native speakers, but about 98% or so actually speak French at home and in daily life (millions of native speakers of Occitan, Oïl dialects, Breton, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and so on, have totally abandonned their native tongues). That would add about 5 million more French speakers to the total. In Canada, there are 6,864,615 native French speakers, but there are 7,214,280 people who speak French at home (that's a higher number because of those Haitian, Italian, Black African, and so on, immigrants to Québec who have abandonned their native tongues). Hardouin 19:08, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

My personal belief... I really think French Language is spoken by more than 100 million people around the world, but I really believe that this number could never reach 200 million. 264M seems to me quite exaggerated 500M?... Impossible. This is a simple question that could be included in the next census... "What is your native language?" It would solve many problems.

[edit] Apples and pears

I note that although for French language some very strict measurement rules have been applied, the rules are much more lax for other languages. The Chinese government, for instance, estimates that only 90 million Chinese people really speak standard Mandarin, yet the article says that there are 872 million native speakers. That 872 million figure can only be reached if you add all native speakers of Sichuanese, Beijingnese, Shandongnese, Manchurian, Nanjingnese, etc., which are all very different dialects. Everyone who has been to China knows that someone from Xi'an cannot understand someone from Nanjing speaking in his/her native dialect. Yet all these people are counted as native speakers of "Mandarin" here.

Another example is German. In Germany about 10% of the population (8 million people) is not ethnically German. Furthermore, a vast proportion of the German population are native speakers of dialects (Bavarian, Franconian, Swabian, and so on), and they learn standard German at school. Yet the entire population of Germany was added up to reach the staggering figure of 95 million native speakers of standard German. Why?

So in a nutshell, in this list the native French speakers of Black Africa are not counted, but on the other hand the native Turkish spearkers of Germany are considered "native German" speakers. Sehr merkwürdig, nicht wahr? Hardouin 19:27, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

What evidence is there that there are native French speakers in Africa? And what evidence do you have that Turks in Germany are counted as "German"? The dialect issue applies to France as well, I'd imagine - Provençal speakers, I'm going to guess, are counted as native French speakers. They don't help much because France, unlike Germany, largely suppressed its dialects so that most people speak standard French now. At any rate, the reason speakers of German, Hindi, and Chinese dialects are counted in the main language is because traditionally those dialects have been considered dialects of the main language. Nobody could argue that, say, Wolof is a dialect of French. john k 19:32, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Wrong. Provençal speakers are not counted as native French speakers. At the 1999 French census there were approximately 90% native French speakers, that doesn't include Provençal or any other regional language. In fact, at the same 1999 census there were only 1% native speakers of Occitan (Provençal is part of the Occitan family). The situation in France is quite comparable to the UK. It is very different from Germany, Italy, or Spain, where there exist very strong dialects and regional languages.
As for Africa, you probably have never been to Abidjan or Casablanca... Situations of native bilingualism are common case. Not to mention that in coastal Ivory Coast French monolingualism is now predominant. Hardouin 19:39, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
I have indeed never been to Africa. I'm confused, though, as to how the fact that lots of people in Africa speak French relates to the question of whether French is those people's native language. You're going to need to present evidence that French is becoming a native language, and that people are speaking French from birth, rather than learning it at school.
I will note, though, that adding up the Ethnologue figures for German doesn't really seem to add up - there appear to be about 10 million people missing - the numbers as given only add up to about 91 million, not 101 million. In terms of dialects, I think that you are probabl exaggerating the extent to which local dialects are genuinely "native languages" at this point in Germany - I think most people at this point speak standard German as their native language, except in Switzerland. The point, though, is that German and its dialects have traditionally been considered to all be one language, "German." The same was once true for French and Provençal, although it may not be anymore. It is certainly true for the various Italian dialects, for the Spanish dialects other than Catalan and Gallego, for the Chinese dialects, for the Hindi dialects, and so forth. Wolof and Arabic, on the other hand, are not French dialects, and so people who speak Arabic as their first language, and French as their second, should not be considered to be native speakers of French, even if they primarily use French. john k 19:46, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Listen, it's better you talk about things you know. About Germany you are totally off mark. There is still largely 50% of the population or more who are native dialect speakers (native that is, not actual language use, but this article is about NATIVE languages). Even in the newest generations there are still many dialect speakers. One of my parents' friends, who is a German language teacher, was telling me recently that his son married an Austrian girl and lives in Austria. He told me when he meets his grandson he cannot understand him because the kid, who is about 5 y/o, speaks only in Austrian dialect (he hasn't been to school yet). There are million of examples like that. In Stuttgart, you can immediately pinpoint who is a native Stuttgarter, and who is a refugee from the second world war, simply by listening which dialect they speak. Native Stuttgarter speak Swabian.
And then I see that you consider Castillian and Gallego to be two separate languages, yet for you all German dialects are the same. Do you know that a Spanish speaking person can easilly understand a Gallego speaker (I can), whereas a Berliner will understand little to nothing of what a Swabian speaker says? Hardouin 19:55, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
These are just a few examples for people in doubt about the mutual-understandability of German dialects. Here are a few words in Swabian and in standard German, so you can see how different the two can be:
  • Ane (Sw.) / Oma (st. G.) = grandma
  • Aabe (Sw.) / Toilette (st. G.) = toilet
  • Griffel (Sw.) / Finger (st. G.) = finger
  • I habs pressant. (Sw.) / Ich bin in Eile. (st. G.) = I'm in a hurry.
  • Mulle (Sw.) / Katze (st. G.) = cat
  • Dokter (Sw.) / Arzt (st. G.) = physician (doctor)
Honestly, any two Romance languages would look closer to each other... Hardouin 20:19, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Mutual comprehensibility is not the issue. I'm not really sure about Gallego - the basic issue is that it's closer to Portuguese than to Castilian, and Portuguese is always considered a separate language. In terms of German dialects, I can't present any specific evidence, but neither can you, and, indeed, you have not presented any evidence, just anecdotes and some suggestive vocabulary differences. I will suggest that the specific vocabulary differences you note do not necessarily make the differences between Swabian and standard German any greater than those between British and American English. For instance, I could give you...

flat (British English) / apartment (American English)
lorry (British English) / truck (American English)
rubbish (British English) / garbage (American English)
trousers (British English) / pants (American English)

And so forth. john k 20:42, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but if you believe German dialects are just mere varieties of standard German, just like American and British English are mere varieties of English, then you are completely deluded. That also reminds me of German nationalists who claimed that after all, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages are mere varieties of German. Hardouin 20:49, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Of course I do not believe that German dialects are simply mere varieties of standard German. I'm just saying that giving a few examples of differing vocabulary are utterly useless. john k 03:53, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I once tried listing languages by linguistic criteria rather than social identity, and it sparked endless POV debate. Are Russian and Ukrainian separate languages, or dialects of one language? Ect. ect. ect. So we list 'German' and 'Chinese' as languages because that's the conception their speakers have. Maybe German is exaggerated, but that's a separate debate and not relevant here. kwami 04:30, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Concerning German, one ought to use their (German) common sense. While there are dialects, all speakers would regard themselves as German speaking since they are able to communicate with other Germans. Of course when some dialect speakers are talking quickly to each other, it will be hard for someone from another dialect to understand, but that's the case for English dialects too. I would take the challenge of understanding any dialect speaker, when he's speaking slowly and accentuated. You're obviously not a German, because the examples you listed are partly quite interchangeable (the words Griffel, Doktor, pressend are for example all valid German words, just less common than their synonyms and I suppose that the standard German words are also known and valid dialect words nowadays, just not in common usage. Swiss German shows some significant differences, but they are mostly in pronounciation (That's what my ears tell me at least). Agree with kwami. -- rubenarslan

I am sorry, but Galician and Catalan are not dialects of Castillian. Nowhere you will find such a stament as yours. Please, study linguistics before getting your hands into such a troublesome field. Bgdgz

[edit] Bilingual people problem in Africa,,India, etc

Recent discussions re French have highlighted a general problem. If a person is completely bilingual (since infancy) which language is their first language? What do we do about black Africans who are bilingual in an African language and French or English or Portuguese? This also applies to Indians who are bilingual between Hindi (etc) and English, etc, etc.

My instinct is to say that there are zero Indians in India for whom English is their first language - ie millions of Indians are of course completely bilingual but they should all automatically be counted as Hindi-speakers not English. So, by the same instinct, I automatically assume the same for Africa. There are millions of Africans who speak English/French fluently but their first language "must" be the African one not English/French. Common sense.

BUT I accept that my instinct is not scientific in any way. The accepted way of deciding which is the first language is to ask which language is spoken at home. Within the context of Europe that means that bilingual members of linguistic minorities should always be included in the total of the minority language - ie every person in the Franch BasquCountry who is bilingual (since infancy) in Basque and French is automaticallly counted as first-language Basque not French. Every person in Wales who is bilingual (since infancy) in Welsh and English is automatically counted as first-language Welsh not English.

This principle seems correct to me in Europe but how does it apply to Africa, India, etc? Are there really any black African families in, say, Nigeria who are bilingual Hausa/English but choose to speak English at home? Hardouin, dicussing the former French colonies, has suggested that some black Africans do choose to use the European language at home. I must confess that I had never considered this possibility. Apart from anything else it seems unpatriotic of them to prefer the ex-colonial language. I had just assumed that, although they were completely bilingual, they would speak an African language within the home. However I am (of course) willing to be corrected on this point.

To summarise, it has always seemed to me to be common sense that ALL black Africans in black Africa must be included in the Hausa, Wolof,etc,etc totals and NONE in the English/French/Portuguese totals. But if it can be shown that some of them do indeed speak a European language at home then I was obviously wrong and we will have to change the Ethnolgue-derived totals to reflect that. Jameswilson 23:05, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

That's where you, and not just you but many Westerners, is wrong. You raised two different questions, so let me answer in order. First native tongues. If someone has two native tongues from birth, then that person should be listed as a native speaker for both languages. Native bilingualism is a very common phenomenon on Earth. It is only in the rich developped world, where nation states are ancient and powerful, that we are lulled into this fantansy that somehow people have only one nation and one language. In most of the third world, where there are few nation states, and countries contain many different ethnic groups, it is very common for people to be bilingual or more. In South-East Asia for instance, the majority of overseas Chinese are bilingual from birth, because often their parents speak two different dialects. I have even met native trilinguals. One example: a Chinese guy I know from Malaysia, his dad speaks Cantonese, his mom speaks Hokkien, but in his mom's family they also speak Hakka, so he has learnt to speak the three languages since birth. Furthermore, he has also been exposed to the dialect of his grandmother, which is from northern Fujian. Then later in life he learnt standard Mandarin, Malay and English. Just count how many languages this guy can speak. A case like that is very frequent in South-East Asia. The same happens in Africa when people from different ethnic groups marry with each other. A good friend of mine from Ivory Coast was telling me that in Abidjan, where there are more than 50 different ethnic groups, people speak French with their children when parents are from a different ethnic group. So there are many native French speakers there. In a place like Casablanca or Tunis, a doctor or a lawyer will speak both Arabic and French to his children from birth. He may use Arabic to scold them for instance, or for endearing language, and then he may use French to discuss their school results, or to tell them something that servants can't understand. The current king of Morocco, for example, is a native speaker of both French and Arabic.
Then you talked about languages spoken at home. This is different from mother tongue. There are many Africans whose native tongue is an African language, but who may choose to use French (or another European language) at home, either because their spouse speak another African language which they do not understand, or because they think it is more fashionable and prestigious to speak French. My friend from Ivory Coast, whom I questioned in detail about these issues, was explaining to me that when you meet someone on the street in Abidjan, you always address the person in French. If you would address the person in an African language, that person may be offended, because he/she would think that you're assuming he/she is dumb and cannot speak French. You say for Africans to speak French at home is unpatriotic. That's a rather strange vision of patriotism. It's a bit like saying that for Irish people to speak English is unpatriotic. For Africans in francophone countries, French is as much theirs as are the other African languages.
You also commented about India. To me, it seems the linguistic situation in India is closer to francophone North Africa than to francophone Black Africa. In North Africa only the elites use French at home, whereas in Black Africa all classes of society use French, especially on the coast (less so in the poorer landlocked states like Niger). I don't think there are Indian cities where English is the language of the street, unlike African cities like Abidjan or Libreville where French is really the language of the street. Hardouin 00:13, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Yes, we certainly need to count native bilinguals. I can see that being important for Ivory Coast, where no one native language dominates, but it's quite different in Benin, where people may be natively bi- or tri-lingual, but not in French (except perhaps among the small elite), and regional languages are the first language of the street. This would be interesting to figure out.
However, you're still making unsubstatiated changes. Your sources contradict your figures. For example, you claim 264M native + second-language speakers, ref. www.diplomatie.gouv.fr, but that site claims only 119M. The 264M figure includes "partial francophones" and students—not what we're counting for any other language! I could double the number of English speakers if I counted them this may, but we need to be consistant across languages. (In fact, I had a long and ill-tempered edit war with someone trying to do just that, in order to get English up to #2 in the world.)
You also keep adding countries against all evidence I can find, and are using a different format for French than for every other language. Please stop trying to get your way by edit warring, and try to convince us by presenting your evidence. You are making the claims: It's up to you to substantiate them. I will continue to revert you until you do. kwami 00:50, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Kwami, thanks for archiving the old stuff - it was making the page so slow that editing was dificult on dial-up.
Hardouin, so you are saying that the concept of a "first language" may not be applicable in some countries of Africa. In that case I dont know what we are going to do with this page. I'm sure you will have great difficulty persuading people to count the same person twice. On this page, I mean - it would be different if the title of the page was "number of fluent speakers".
I completely acknowledge that it may be a Euro-centric concept to say that bilingual people must have a preference for one of the languages. I think it does work in Europe though. This is why the "language spoken at home" criterion works well in Europe because many minorities had problems speaking their maternal language in public (in some cases were forbidden by law) but could do so in the privacy of their own home. So the language they spoke at home (when they were free to choose) was obviously their preferred language.
(BTW - yes in Europe it often really is a question of patriotism. If two Catalan-speakers meet, they would never speak in Spanish. For reasons of Catalan patriotism. I'm surprised that some francophone black Africans prefer to use French in a situation where an African language would be possible. I believe you, but I find it surprising and perhaps a bit depressing after 40+ years of independence.}
Part of it is that it has been 40+ years, and colonialism no longer has the sting it once did. French may favor those with access to education, but at least it's ethnically neutral. In Ivory Coast, where no local language commands more than a few percent of the population, there is no other obvious choice for a national language. I also know families in Malaysia who raise their children speaking English, and of course Native (Latin) Americans continue to shift to the colonial language Spanish in large numbers. kwami 04:53, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Anyway, we are still left with the problem of how to calculate numbers in Africa. Fluency is not enough, because people can be equally fluent in both languages. What criteria do you suggest to determine which is the first language and which is the second language of a particular person (your friend in Abidjan, for example)? Or is it just impossible? Jameswilson 02:56, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
"Fluency" is a nightmare. The data simply does not exist. I have no problem counting people as natively bilingual (we say as much in the intro); after all, we're interested in what people speak, not in pigeon-holing everyone. If someone is raised speaking two languages then yes, they're counted twice. There is the problem of whether 'native' means mother tongue or home language, but the reality is that the distinction is not always made in our sources. All we can do is avoid edits that obviously treat languages unequally. kwami 04:53, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I think it is up to Hardouin to provide some evidence for a substantial number of Africans who speak French (or English, or whatever) in the home. Certainly Ethnologue provides no hint of this, and it's generally been our principal source for figuring out the numbers on this page. Note Ethnologue's listing for French (this doesn't include patois or dialects):

Algeria: 110,600 Andorra: 2,400 Belgium: 4,000,000 Benin: 16,700 Burundi: 2,200 Canada: 6,700,000 Central African Republic: 9,000 Chad: 3,000 Comoros: 1,700 Congo: 28,000 Côte d'Ivoire: 17,470 Djibouti: 15,440 French Polynesia: 25,668 Gabon: 37,500 Guadeloupe: 7,300 Haiti: 600 Lebanon: 16,600 Luxembourg: 13,100 Madagascar: 18,000 Mali: 9,000 Martinique: 9,000 Mauritius: 37,000 Mayotte: 2,450 Monaco: 17,400 New Caledonia: 53,400 Niger: 6,000 Réunion: 2,400 Rwanda: 2,300 Saint Pierre and Miquelon: 5,114 Seychelles: 977 Switzerland: 1,272,000 Togo: 3,000 Tunisia: 11,000 United Kingdom: 14,000 Vanuatu: 6,300 Wallis and Futuna: 120

Belgium 4,000,000 people with french as a first language? You must be kidding. That's Wallonia + Brussels. Citizens. in Wallonia there's a large part (altough numbers drop) that speak Wallon. In Brussels we have the impression we all speak french as our mothertongue, altough that's not the truth, we all speak french there because Flemish/Dutch is considered as filth by the French-speaking Brussel inhabitants. In French Flanders, a big group speaks, guess.... yes, Flemish/Dutch as a first language. But as the concept in France is One State, One Language, this is not officialy, at least not on for France. I would like to remind you Corsican isn't considered as a seperate and/or official language for the French, or at least that's not in their constitution. Ocitan is a seperate language, also in France, very close related to Catalan. Once again considered as French, in France (the Ocitan I mean). All can be found here on wikipedia, with their references to external links, but it's all too much too look it up. But it can be checked :) Christophe, 6:25, 21 june 2006 (CET)

That is to say - it gives small numbers of native speakers in most African countries, but clearly nowhere near a significant percentage of the population. It should be up to Hardouin to find some evidence which contradicts this. (It ought to be noted that in addition to this, we have several million speakers of French dialects in Europe, and several million speakers of French Creoles in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean) john k 04:24, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

How can you trust a source that says that there are only 17,470 native French speakers in Ivory Coast? That's ridiculous. Hardouin 12:05, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Let me quote Lansana Kouyaté, a well-known Ivorian diplomat: "French is one of our mother tongues. History creates linguistic communities. You're born in it and you assume it! I speak French, I speak Bété, I am francophone, I am bétéphone. Let's drop the "hang-ups" and set French as an Ivorian language." Hardouin 12:19, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
This is not evidence. Ethnologue may not be accurate, but it's basically our source for this entire article. At the very least, you're going to have to cite some kind of statistical source which gives some number of native Francophones in Cote d'Ivoire. Citing a diplomat (who is not necessarily saying that French is his "native language" in the sense that we mean on this page) making a vague quote is not sufficient. john k 18:31, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
I have already listed sources, in particular the University of Laval website. Hardouin 12:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Native speakers

Naturally this article is affected by systemic bias. For ethnologue not to consider blacks or africans as native speakers of a european language is typical Systemic bias. Almost all countries in africa use a combination of local languages and European languages(principally french, english, and portuguese). In my home country of Zambia English is the official language, which means all official and government business is conducted in english. All newspapers and majority of television and radio shows are in English. The entire education system from primary school to university is in english. Essentially anybody who can read or write knows english. This obviously convienient as there almost 72 local dialects. That said Zambians are very proud of their local languages and almost everybody speaks or understands at least three languages by default- Bemba, Nyanja and English. Most Zambians will switch languages effortlessly depending on the situation eg when speaking to older people or people from rural areas one would use local languages, conversly when speaking with younger people or at work one would use english. I would best describe the use of english as a spectrum or some kind of uniform distribution. There is a small minority on one end who have completely no understanding of english and small minority of on the other end who use english exclusively. The majority in the middle have some ability to use both.

Back to systemic bias as I have digressed quite a bit. The belief in the west is that native speakers of english are only found in the US, UK, Canada and Australia(Basically white britons and british immigrants). Slowly these misconceptions are begining to change. The outsourcing of millions of jobs from the US and Europe to English speaking India is a case in point. In the next half century it is likely that there will be more french speakers in Africa than the rest of the world combined. This due to rising populations in francophone africa.

Yes, I completely take your point. As I said above re the Ivory Coast, I still find it strange that independence didnt lead to a rejection of English/French - when a country in Europe becomes independent one of the first things the new government does is promote the local language/dialect at the expense of the "language of oppression" (even when there is hardly any difference, as in the former Yugoslavia).

What do you think will happen in two or three generations time? Will English still be widely spoken in Zambia or will it have been replaced as the language of government and the media by a lingua franca based on an African language? As is happening gradually with Sango in the Central African Republic, for example. Jameswilson 22:42, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

-- Independence didn't necessarily lead to rejection of European languages. As mentioned earlier, There are more languages spoken in sub-saharan africa than any other region on the planet. When the european colonialists carved out africa, it was done with little regard to ethnic or linguistic boundaries. So in many countries there are several languages eg zambia has about 72, nigeria 250. To avoid potential conflicts that could arise if one local language was imposed upon the general population, English was selected as a unifying force.

However in Tanzania, English was rejected and Swahili was adopted as the official language. This was possible as Swahili had been used for thousands of years in East Africa, as a sort of intermediary language between local african tribes and also between africans and arab traders. Because Swahili was used as an intermediary language it is very adaptable to new and foreign linguistic concepts. It is much easier to translate more complex scientific or phylosophical concepts into Swahili than it would be into many other african languages. Non-swahili speaking africans also say swahili is easy to learn.Muntuwandi 03:06, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

And incidentally, the figure for second language KiSwahili speakers is far too low - effectively everyone in Kenya and Tanzania who has ever been to school has at least some Swahili, and large numbers of people in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, parts of Congo - my guess (& it is only a guess) would be 60-80 million. --KenBrown 14:36, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Leaving the grid

Bye, folks. I'm leaving the grid for the next year. I've become the default (some would say self-appointed) maintainer of this article, but I won't be able to do this any longer. I'm hoping some of you out there in the wings will take over. This list could really go to seed if we don't keep on top of it -- basically just reverting the steady stream of unsubstantiated edits in populations and where spoken. kwami 17:23, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Turkish in Bulgaria

As I stated some time ago, Turkish is currently not an official language in Bulgaria. After all, I am from Bulgaria, and I would have been the first to know if our constitution had been changed. Yes, I know it's listed as "regional" language on some sites, but this doesn't change the facts. I will repeat what I said before: a lot of people speak Turkish here (can't recall the exact percentage), but for now Bulgarian is the only official language. If you look at the Bulgaria page in Wikipedia, you'll see that it alsa says so. The Constitution of Bulgaria says so too. So let's keep the information in this article correct. --Mégara (Мегъра) - D. Mavrov 20:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Number of Native English Speakers

308 million native (2004 CIA)

I presume that "CIA" refers to the online CIA World Factbook. But I cannot find any statistics there that refer specifically to the number of native English speakers. On the other hand, I did find this reference for a number of native English speakers equalling 322 million. (Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999)). If somebody cannot give me a clear link to/reference for the figure of 308 million, I will replace it with the claim and reference I have. --Susurrus 08:00, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

It should be noted that 2 billion people can speak at least some English.Cameron Nedland 23:19, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
If you can give a reliable source for the figure, go ahead. The current figure in the table (515 million) seems way too low (see List of countries by English speaking population). -- Avenue 10:25, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
It was on the English language article for a whileand I have a book called Human: The Definitive Visual Guide to prove it.Cameron Nedland 23:05, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
To prove what? The 515 million is low, based on the Ethnologue which is not really interested in keeping its data on English up-to-date, apparently. But 2 billion? Maybe if you included everyone who can say "Hello", okay. But certainly not that many are able to carry on a simple conversation in English, much less consider themselves fluent for purposes of work, research, and so on. I've been trying to find reliable numbers all evening on the web, and so far I'm turning up empty. Is no one interested in trying to research this topic? MrAldrich 01:36, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
Given that no reliable numbers can be found at the moment, I have replaced the unrealistic number of second language English speakers by a wide range estimate (as done in English language): 150 million–1.5 billion. Marcoscramer 18:46, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Using The World Factbook

I say why not use calculations or estimates from The World Factbook (2006 Edition) to settle the dispute this page rages from time to time?. AshrafSS 17:19, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

I've read this article but I've not found the source of all numbers of speakers. What is this article? A Wikipedia's research? A combination of differents sources? In this last case which was the discriminant to choose a number and not another? IMHO this is a "research" and this is an original reasearch, not verifiable, and this is also NPOV because Wikipedia has chosen statistics without indicating the parameters on this. For example, who choosed to merge Swiss German with Standard German? These are very different languages and in Swiss people speak Swiss German (Alemmanisch) as 1st language and standard german as 2nd language (I live in Swiss)?

The interpretations are two (as I can believe because there is any preface to the list):

  1. this is an integrable article with verifiable numbers, but I think not in this case because I've proposed some integrations and these are not accepted because my indications was considered "original" although based on "official" sources (Census and Foreign Offices) but none told me how integrate correctly my indications (I would read a note in a paragraph of this article where are indicated all accepted sources).
  2. This is a strange combination of "accepted" lists (and the question could be: who choose the official list?) and research like Ethnologue, CIA, etc., but, as all people could verify, these are very different lists with different numbers, with different approaches (all of these don't contemplate the emigrants for examples but are based on "simple" number of inhabitants). Any combination is POV because Wikipedia accepts these data without criticism and any census verify punctually that any number is an euristic number.

In this case I can believe this article "original" and "NPOV". The right approach should be the same as you can see in italian Wikipedia indicating different statistics ("this institute, this organization publishes this statistic not wikipedia") with comments. In this example Wikipedia takes no choose, indicates all points of view with references and comments as an NPOV article should be done, and we have a less number of flame.

At last I've had the opportunity to verify the En-Wikipedian censorship, Ok, fortunately there are some tools to control it. I've seen some proposal and an user who accept or not accept these: is this the correct approach for an wikipedian article? or this approach shows it that there is a (big!!!) problem on this article? --Ilario 13:22, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Agree that it should move to the italian wikipedia model - the article currently seems to pick and choose it's sources - also the table format is fairly ugly. Megapixie 07:03, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. A single list is more useful than several lists. It requires more editorial judgement to produce, but nothing insurmountable in my opinion. I don't buy the argument that "any combination [of lists] is POV"; the same principle would mean any selection of information to form an article (including the selection of the lists presented in the Italian Wikipedia article), and therefore all of Wikipedia is POV.
Also the various source lists are presented in Language speaker data. And there was an earlier discussion about Swiss German here: Talk:List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers/archive1_(2006_April)#Germany_is_not_listed... -- Avenue 12:21, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
The combination is NPOV if this combination has in-depth rules to specify the numbers (Ok, but the rules could be POV). If we have different lists this problem is solved (it's simply a report). If we have a combination with all numbers of different lists we should take part for a list and not for another because we should choose an order, and in this case Wikipedia has taken a defined opinion (take opinion=POV). To be NPOV and to have a combination we should have every possible combination of numbers and orders. About your example we are POV because we have taken a decision considering for some languages the numbers of writers, for others the numbers of speakers... Should we consider also the number of thinkers? And about dialects? I know persons who use swiss german daily and not german, or Cantonese and not standard Chinese, which is the rule to decide that one is a dialect and one is language? --Ilario 13:17, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese

Why are Cantonese and other languages included as part of Chinese when they are plainly different languages from Mandarin? (Stpaul 11:30, 2 June 2006 (UTC))

It's a disputed fact whether Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects or Languages by themselves. However, it is generally accepted that they are dialects of the same language. (Chinese) I hope this helps a bit. Footballrocks41237 02:11, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Cantonese generally do not write what they say, when they write, they write in the language identical to what "Chinese"(I mean "Standard Spoken Chinese" speakers, i.e. so called "Mandarin" speakers) speak and write.

Hay so there the same, ok so we lump all the Germanic, Romance, Afro-asiatic, Australian Aboriginal languages together, HAY they sound the same to me. Please leave politice out and use proper linguistic supplied references and sources. Enlil Ninlil 04:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WTF?

Something is clearly wrong. English should be #1 because 2 billion people speak it to some degree, where as 'Chinese' is a highly fragmented set of loosely related languages. By that criteria English again be on top because you'd have to add German, Dutch and the Scandanavian languages.Cameron Nedland 02:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

This list is based on the number of native speakers of the various languages, not anyone who can "speak it to some degree'. Our table breaks Chinese into some of its component languages, and with 872 native speakers Mandarin would still be first by a long way. Or do you believe Mandarin is also a collection of languages? If so, please provide a source for the claim. This list tries to follow local perceptions of what is a language and what is a dialect, but the Chinese situation is apparently quite contentious (see e.g. Identification of the varieties of Chinese). -- Avenue 10:18, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

There is a highly fragmented set of loosely related Chinese languages, but the Chinese language, i.e. the Manadarin language, is one standardised language spoken throughout China and elsewhere. 129.12.200.49 14:31, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The and hindi thing dosen't make sense

Insert non-formatted text here

umm... I noticed it says on the page and some other pages that spanish is third (sometimes fourth) whilst english is fourth (sometimes third) yet most pages on the internet and some books put it at either number two or three. Are the internet sites and books misguided, if not can someone fix it. I would but I can't really be bothered.

here are some links I found: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html (-this one refers to ethnologue too) http://www.linguasphere.org/language.html http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0724-unesco.html

p.s. and the numbers on the page don't add up if u tally up the populations of the nations mentioned(AND counting india at about 300 million etc.) some one should really fix, I would but I can't be bothered.

This page uses the number of native speakers. The first and second of your links only give total figures including non-native speakers. The third ranks based on the midpoint of a range, and I'm not sure that their ranges are equally fair to all the languages you mention. So it's not as simple as you make it sound. -- Avenue 08:47, 23 July 2006

(UTC)

Even if we stick to native speakers only, English should be ahead of Spanish in the ranking. The Wikipedia article underestimates the number of native English speakers outside the US, Canada, the British Isles, and Australia/New Zealand, just as it underestimates for that matter the number of native Francophones outside France, Belgium/Switzerland, and Canada. Conversely, the article overestimates the number of native Spanish speakers in Spain and Latin America (where Spanish is NOT the first language of a significant percentage of the population) and probably also overstates the number of native speakers of Spanish in the US based on the ambiguous question on "language most often spoken at home" in the US census. BTW, exaggerating the number of speakers of a given language for nationalistic reasons is a recurrent problem in the Wikipedia: in addition to Spanish or Chinese, figures for native speakers of languages such as German, Portuguese, Irish Gaelic and many others have also been inflated. Since it is difficult to determine precisely what a native speaker means, one can always conceivably come up with some kind of head count that will suit his/her intended target figure. 200.177.36.169 12:51, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Latin

Why is Latin listed while, for example, Icelandic (another official state language, but with more speakers) isn't?

What, Latin isn't listed... 惑乱 分からん 15:04, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
It was, briefly. I removed it. john k 18:12, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I realized that later. Good done... 惑乱 分からん 20:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese & Hindi separate table

Do we really have to use a separate table for Chinese & Hindi? It looks broken and confused me before I saw the note in the page source. Moskvax 01:16, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Irish?

According to the 2002 Republic of Ireland census, 1.6 million there can speak Irish, while 165,000 can speak it in Northern Ireland and 25,000 use it regulary in the USA. Should it be on the table?

Is this native speakers? 惑乱 分からん 18:54, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Not for the Republic of Ireland. The census just asked whether people were able to speak Irish, and if so, how often they did so. Almost a quarter of Irish speakers spoke it daily, but they were mainly school-age children. Apart from them, the vast majority of the Irish speakers (87% of those aged 20+) did not speak it daily.[1]
There's a breakdown of the Northern Ireland figure in our Irish language in Northern Ireland article, although there isn't a "native speaker" category. The figure mentioned above includes those who can understand but not speak the language. Removing them leaves at most 131,000 who can speak the language.
The US figure (actually 25,870) is for those who speak Irish at home,[2] which might be close enough.
But, even being generous, it seems that the total number of native Irish speakers in these countries would be less than 600,000, so we probably shouldn't list it in the table. -- Avenue 13:44, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] THERE ARE NO ZULUS IN SICILY

WARNING, I removed a racist insult probably written by the racists of Italian Northern League under the voice "Zulu". You probably didn't understand: Italian racists use the world "zulu" in the meaning of savage or ignorant. Meaning this, the writer added that "zulu" was spoken in Sicily (which isn't) and included "other terronian lands". The word "terrone" is an insult based over the Italian word "terra" (land) given by racists of northern league to southerners of Italy, who were, in ancient times, mainly peasants. Nowadays, of course, southern Italy is more cultured and advanced of north, having a very higher rate of graduated then north. PLEASE, identify the author of this racist insult. Val

It appears to have been written by someone with the IP address User:83.145.218.201 — who has made many other Italy-related edits that have been challenged. (I would like to clarify this: the IP must come from Italy, but that does not mean it's the same person making all the edits.) The "Zulu" edit was in fact made on 25 July 2006, so it has been there for some time. Thank you for spotting it and being bold enough to remove it. ... discospinster talk 14:09, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Portuguese

I didn't understand why portuguese is ranked 7th. Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay, are different languages, can't be counted as one. And Arabic are not mutually intelligible. I propose portuguese must be ranked as 5th, once we are counting native speakers only. If Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay can be summed why not sum Portuguese with Spanish, they are completely mutually intelligible.

This has needed cleaning up for a long time. I have the reverts in hand, but it may take a while to upload them.
A better comparison to Malay would be Portuguese and Galician. But we're going by popular conception here, not mutual intelligibility. kwami 14:17, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
Portuguese and Spanish are not mutually intelligible. True, many native speakers of can communicate with many native speakers of the other, but it's usually through comprimising complete understanding. See Portuñol/Portunhol. —Morganfitzp 05:27, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Look at this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_distribution_of_Portuguese there if we calculate the values, we will obtain a number greater than the one showed on the rank (we will obtain 230 million). And I still haven't seen all the varieties of Arabic separte. I hope this update could be done pretty soon. See ya.

This is a complete insane list concerning Portuguese.... Only in Brazil we have around 187 millions native speakers + around 11 millions in Portugal, we get 198 million, only in this two countries! A number very different than 174 millions.

[edit] All right

I understand that we are only by popular concept and not by mutual intelligibiliy. I just did a comparison in the previous scrap. Just to point out that Indonesian and Malay cannot be summed.

Another thing to point out is that Indonesian is just second language in Indonesia, coexisting wiht Javanese and many other distinct languages. And the people of East Timor do not speak Indonesia primarilly, in East Timor around 15% speaks Portuguese and the other 85% speaks Tetum.

Well as you said you already have the corrections in your hands, I hope we can see it posted in Wikipedia pretty soon.

Thank You!!!

    Shouldn't Indonesian be at number six? Between Arabic and Portuguese? 203.118.32.120 07:33, 1 December 2006 (UTC)Tiddysmith 1/12/06

[edit] Numbers Fudged

The numerics for English have been totally under-estimated. If you add the population of the United States and the United Kingdom alone you're 50 mil over the total estimate. Not to mention the other countries of the Commonwealth of Nations which all exclusively use English.

I'll attempt to add them up and get a figure based on each countries wiki entry. It's scary no one has picked up on this before. Jachin 08:30, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, base evaluation of countries citing it as their official language vary drastically, almost criminally, with the 308m cited. My finger is sore, but I came up with 1,076,971,480 not including India. On discussing this matter with a handful of Indian friends I have been assured that every Indian except perhaps 'exceptionally poor who live in very rural conditions' is raised natively bilingual. So let's give that the benefit of the doubt just to evaluate a total figure: -
2,180,342,480
I think that if the 308,000,000 quoted is due to the criteria of this 'list' is the cause for disparity, I put it to the editors of this article that it is not of encyclopedic value as the criterion forces the overlook of potentially 1,872,342,480, which is a vile underestimisation and devaluation of many of the worlds citizens. These are drastically large numbers we're dealing with as far as remainders of mystical 'rounding's of these statistics.
Thus, I question the editors who commenced this article as to the purpose of it and further how on earth such massive differences have occured making it numerically ambiguous and illogical yielding an absurd result? If there is no major protest (please, protest, because I don't feel like making such massive changes) in the next 24 hours I will go about refining the list to represent the numerics of English appropriately. Further, over the period of the next few weeks I will attempt to do the same with all other languages to evaluate their true usage and not some farcically inaccurate measurement as given in the case of the English numeric. 308 .. dear god. UK, USA, Canada, Australia alone is almost double that. :P Jachin 08:58, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
I've given it 48 hours, I'll give it another 24. Please, protest. Don't make me work. :( Jachin 00:44, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
OK, you asked. Cite a source and don't do original research. Dont' assume that all Americans and Canadians speak English. --Sean Brunnock 01:04, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

You must not sum simply all the population account. If you do that the list will became inaccurate. And.... everybody in India speaking English, you´re joking you know! With more than 600 Millions of its population living below the poverty line, and considering the fact that Hindi and English are completely different in grammar structure, alphabet and phonology you´re out of your mind. And just to finish... This list is only for NATIVE SPEAKERS, not everybody that has a contact with English. I don't know how many languages do you speak, but I can assure you that the second language you speak, you're not completely able to understand and express yourself without a paraphrasis, or stop to think how you must say something. (Unless, you borned bilingual). For sure English is the most important language in world nowaday, but not everybody is native to it, and are fully capable to express itself like an American or English does. And I really believe that PERHAPS, the number of second language speakers must be wrong, but definitilly the number of first language usage is correct (for the year that are referenced in). Robledo

You might be interested in List of countries by English-speaking population. Based on the figures there, 308 million seems way too low for the number of native English speakers, but 1 billion is far too high. -- Avenue 08:18, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
  • One thing is for sure and everybody knows, the number for Portuguese 176 is the most gross error in the list. 176 is stupid because it is lower than the number of speakers in Brazil alone. But it is maybe useful for comparision, or we should find better credible sources, because anyone seeing that, will laugh and discredit the list. Wikipedia should not reproduce errors found in the net! --Pedro 10:41, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree in charge with you Pedro, but try looking the wikipedia in Portuguese, I made the portuguese version and correct some mistakes of the version in English, but I'm still finishing it and looking for all kind of sources. That's I removed all the references, but I'll put it again later. Robledo


[edit] Quick calculation of the number of native english speakers in just 4 countries using referenced percentages of their total population that speaks english

The article for Languages in the United States and the CIA world factbook linked below both state that 82% of the population of the United states (300 million as of 2006) speak english natively. This gives a total of 246 million native speakers of english in the US alone. if this ranking article is correct then the entire native english speaking population of the US (246 million) plus the united kingdom (60 million total population - minus about 25% of the total population of wales of 3 million or 0.75 million for 59.25 million english speakers) plus Canada (33 million population total 60% english for 20 million) plus Australia (20 million total 80% english for 16 million) gives a total of 341 million native english speakers allowing a population of only *negative* 33 million speakers in *all* other native english speaking populations in the world (308 million(article total) minus 341 million (english speaking total for US + UK + Canada + australia)). How can there be such a large negative population of english speakers in all of the other countries?

Here are the links to pages that back up the populations and percentages given for:

The USA: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html

The United Kingdom: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/uk.html

Canada: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ca.html

Australia: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/as.html

using the language percentages and total populations from those links makes the 308 million native english speaker total simply impossible.

If no links can be shown to back up the 308 million total in a way that addresses the existing native speaker totals for *at least* those 4 countries (341 million) then I will change the article to the totals for those 4 countries rather than the absurd 308 million figure currently shown. Granted my total of 341 million native speakers ignores millions of native english speakers in all other countries but it would still be a dramatic improvment over the existing figure.


Besides the 25% of Wales that natively speaks Welsh, there are presumably a fairly large number of immigrants for whom Urdu or Chinese or Hindi or whatever is the native language, no? Plus a minuscule number of native Gaelic speakers. But it does seem as though the current number is low, especially given that there must be a fair number of native English speakers in New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, the West Indies, and scattered about elsewhere. john k 21:54, 10 September 2006 (UTC)


I completely agree about the UK figure but take note that the existing figure cites "cia" (presumably world factbook) as its source and if you look at the Uk entry in the CIa world factbook you will find that for language breakdown it only lits 25% of the population of wales as the non native english speaking population. I am simply using the reference cited in the article. Also take note that the entries for the other 3 countries in the cia world factbook are far less ambiguous simply stating the percentage of the total population that are native speakers of english.

Reviewing the discussion so far I see this number (308 million) has been questioned for some time already. I am going to go ahead and change it to the modest minimum total of 341 million I determined now. It is probably still too low but it is an obvious improvement over the existing figure.

Note, though, that the figures for the US, say, are presumably based on the 200 census, not the 2005 census estimate. This creates problems, no? john k 09:53, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
Your figure for the US seems too high, since the 82% figure is apparently based on the population aged 5 or more.(Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000) Why not simply use the numbers from List of countries by English-speaking population, rather than rely on these error-prone calculations based on percentages? I realise some of the figures are a bit outdated, but at least they have direct sources. The top ten countries there (ordered by number of native speakers) give a total of nearly 320 million native English speakers. -- Avenue 10:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)


HEY, WE HAVE A PARCIAL ACCOUNT HERE. THE 308MILLIONS IS FOR 2004 AND NOT FOR 2006. IF WE ARE TO UPDATE THE NUMBER, WE MUST UPDATE SPANISH AS WELL. AND TELL ME SOMETHING, WHY ENGLISH MUST BE AT THE TOP ALWAYS? YOU SIMPLY DON'T LIKE TO BE OVERPASSED BY ANYONE ELSE??? WHAT'S THE MATTER, WE ARE NOT THE BEST IN EVERYTHING!!!

Why don't you take a look at this same article in Portuguese.... The number seems quite the same you did.


What on Earth? now the article reports 425 million native speakers of english. Even assuming that every single inhabitant of the US, the UK, Australia and Canada were native english speakers I don't think the total would approach such a number. The rest of the countries (ireland, new zealand, south africa, etc) certainly don't have the population to make up the difference. Does anybody know where the 425 million native speakers figure comes from? Are there several million Indians who learn english as a first language or something? Zebulin 16:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This article is poorly cited

I've disputed the acuracy of this article because it refers numerous times to a mysterious CIA document from 2004 without any further details. If someone knows what this document is, please cite the details correctly. If this document is the CIA world factbook, I'm not sure that we should use it; it is very unclear what they mean by counting someone as speaking a language. It is not at all obvious if they mean as his or her main daily language or first language or some type of fluency level or what. If we can't find a better source I think we should revert everything to the numbers from Ethnologue. It would be a shame to use so much 1984 data, though and it seems that the number of English speakers is something of a contetious issue. The Ethnologue puts this at 309 million[3] (using data from various times between 1970 and 2004). I don't think people would stand for that, but there is little point in just guessing numbers out of thin air. I think that the Ethnologue is the most widely respected source and may be as accurate as we can get, but if people think it is out of date there is a vaguely accademic article from 2001 here comparing a number of sources. This may serve as a jumping off point to find a more satisfactory sum. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cwlq (talk • contribs) .

I agree that the article is poorly cited, and that we should strive to improve this. I'm not so sure that Ethnologue is widely respected, and it's certainly not as accurate as we can get. Its figures are often very out of date (I've come across figures from 1960 in the English speakers section). Having said that, it is at least fairly comprehensive in its coverage. It could provide a reasonable starting point, but we shouldn't hesitate to use better sources where they exist. -- Avenue 23:38, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
The Linguistic Society of America has a good summary of multilingualism at [4]. If we incorporate some of that information into the introduction it may diffuse some controversy. This document from the LSA seems to suppost Ethnologue as the most reliable source [5]. It may be the case that for many regions and languages up-to-date estimates are not availible and it is beyond the scope of this article to provide statistical projections for figures today. For instance, the paper "How Many People Use ASL in the United States? Why Estimates Need Updating" (Mitchell et al. Sign Language Studies 6.3 (2006) p306-335) notes that the last comprehensive survey of American Sign Languages users was done in 1974. The papers "Competence Differences between Native and Near-Native Speakers" (Coppieters Language, Vol. 63, No. 3. (Sep., 1987), pp. 544-573.) and "Native Speaker Reaction to Non-Native Speech" (Schairer The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 76, No. 3. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 309-319.) supports the relevance of counting only native speakers. I strongly suggest that we revert all numbers to those given in the most recent edition of the Ethnologue and note in a consistant format the date that figure respresents. If more recent and reliable data exists, then we should certainly use that. However, I have not seen any other reliable sources. Chris Quackenbush 06:19, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Languages in Israel

Hungarian, Polish and German (not Yiddish) are all spoken in Israel, and i know some people who speak each of them. They are alive and well and not necessarily very old. There are daily newspapers in Hungarian and German and maybe Polish too. Ethnologue supports that.

I haven't met any Ukrainian speakers in Israel personally. All those who came to Israel from Ukraine spoke Russian. Ethnologue doesn't list Israel as a country where Ukrainian is spoken, however i am not erasing Israel from the list, because first of all, some children who learned Ukrainian in school in the 90's may prefer it to Russian and secondly, a local satellite TV provider started showing a Ukrainian channel lately. So maybe there is truth to that claim. --Amir E. Aharoni 07:23, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ordering

If Spanish and Hindi have 390M and 370M native speakers respectively, why is Hindi above Spanish? Similarly why is Bengali (171M) above Arabic (206M) and French (120M) above Japanese (127M), etc? Lfh 14:22, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

I was just going to say the same. I think that since there is over 300 million people in the Arab world, so 206M is definately too small. I don't know how to edit the template, though.--Fox Mccloud 14:37, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

People, Arabic is a ethinicity, but they are different languages. The Arabic spoken in the Lebanoon, is not comprehensible in the Argelia. It would the same as we sum all latin people, then we would have Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian and Spanish altogether.... I think we should make distinctions in this case, we must put Maghreb Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Egyptian Arabic. Otherwise, we must put together, Portuguese-Spanish, Indonesian-Malay, Norsk-Swedish-Danish, this languages are almost the same with little variation while Arabic is not.Robledo


The count for Bengali (171 M) is definitely incorrect. Bangladesh alone has a total population of 150 million+ (of which, almost 99% are native Bengali speakers). Add West Bengal, and Assam, you go past 220 million easily. --Ragib 23:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Languages in Israel again

Ifeldman84: I really don't know anyone personally anyone who speaks Ukrainian, but i didn't delete your edit - just marked it with {{fact}}. Most of the information in this article is based on Ethnologue and it doesn't say that anyone speaks Ukrainian in Israel. If you can prove that anyone does, you are welcome to send me your source for that.

  • Spanish - i lived in a kibbutz full of Spanish speakers. Did you count Spanish speakers in Israel one by one and got to less than 1%? Even less than 1% is still significant and in Israel there are much more than 1%.
  • Persian - there are clubs in Tel Aviv and Netanya that play Persian music. There's an Israli TV channel in Persian. There's a Kol Israel station in Persian. Moshe Katzav speaks Persian and has a radio program in Persian.
  • Polish - my professor (ראש חוג) in the University speaks Polish and she's not old at all.
  • As for Amharic - what language do all the Ethiopians speak?? Ukrainian maybe?

Please stop changing the article without any proof. --Amir E. Aharoni 05:14, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Urdu and Hindi

I notice Hindi and Urdu have two seperate entries. However, they are widely considered to be two terms for the same language (albeit implying differences in the script used to write the language). Should they not have one entry? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.12.200.49 (talk • contribs) 14:26, 29 September 2006.

In many cases, Urdu and Hindi are classified together as one language, Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu. Many sources such as infoplease, Tigerx, and several others classify them together when giving populations statistics of speakers. Not to mention, linguists count them together as one language. Also, articles here on Wikipedia, dealing with Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani, such as Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) word etymology, Hindi-Urdu grammar, Uddin and Begum Urdu-Hindustani Romanization, and Hindustani orthography utilize only one article since the differences (script and formal voabulary) are minimal. With all of this in mind, it is possible that this article could combine the two under one entry. With regards, AnupamTalk 21:29, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The issue of linguistic definition for this article is a difficult one. Compare to Chinese, which is listed as a single language, despite consisting of a number of mutually incomprehensible dialects. I think the conclusion come to was to list languages based on self-definition, rather than linguistic criteria. john k 03:48, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Besides the case for self-definition, written Urdu and written Hindi are mutually unintelligible. Same goes for formal oral form as seen on TV news. Hindi news from DD would be unintelligible to most Urdu speakers and vice-versa. So, although the colloquial languages are mutually intelligible, the formal languages are not, hence justifying the separation. Hindustani, however, refers to the spoken language in everyday use, which is similar (not same) for Hindi and Urdu. Consider days of the week or words of Sanskrit origin in Hindi. They are completely different in Urdu, aren't they?
For Chinese, based on mutual unintelligibility of formal spoken forms, despite same written form, I personally think Mandarin and Cantonese should not be lumped together.
64.194.250.99 16:12, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

The issues mentioned above mix up several categories, such as socio-linguistics, grammar, vocabulary etc. And there is of course the political and socio-political (including religious) angle, which played and plays a major role in the formation of what is today modern Hindi in the Nagari script and a Sanskritised vocabulary. But such blurring of categories is nothing unusual in the discourse on Hindi/Urdu, so maybe one should be pragmatic and stick to the official categorisations in South Asia. — However, there is another problem, namely that of the so-called "varieties" and "dialects" of Hindi. As anyone conversant with the problematics of defining "language" and "dialect" knows, these classifications are often arbitrary, and this is, in the case of Hindi, now even so in official usage in India, where Maithili is now a Schedule Eight language, and Bhojpuri is bound to follow in a few years' time. This incongruity has not gone unnoticed even in the Indian parliament, where an MP tried to make a distinction between "bhasha" and "boli" to nevertheless subsume Maithili under Hindi even though it is now officially a separate language (as it always was to the Sahitya Akademi, as well as various universities in Bihar and Nepal). Some of today's "dialects" or "varieties" of Hindi were actually the literary languages in use in northern India before Khari Boli (e.g. Braj, Awadhi, Maithili), and are in part still used in such a function independently of Khari Boli. One could go on an on about this issue, but these example should suffice. From which it follows that there is clearly a lot to be thought about in the context of "Hindi". Anuragi 08:29, 14 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Hindi speaker

I think some sort of clarification of how this magical 480 million number is achieved. India has a population of about 1.1 billion. I'm unsure how many non-resident Hindi speakers speak Hindi as a first language especially beyond first generation. For example, Kenyans of Indian origin speak Hindi but their native language/first language tends to be Swahili especially beyond first generation of immigration.

However, considering the populous non-Hindi-speaking Southern, Northern, Eastern and Western states in India, and the few Central states that partially speak Urdu (which I'm considering to be a distinct language as it is unintelligible to Hindi speakers in written or formal oral form), it astonishes me that still half of the country is supposed to be native Hindi speakers. Plus if one considers ethonologue report from 1998, Hindi was rated much lower in terms of population. Has Hindi population really doubled in 8 years? It's a little dubious. I smell a little bit of exaggeration for nationalistic reasons (as someone mentioned above) although I could be wrong of course :). Could someone shed some light on this?

Thanks you.

64.194.250.99 19:12, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

per the "number of speakers" entry on Hindi, it has "333 million" native speakers. Feel free to help cleanup by adding {{fact}} to unsourced numbers. dab (ᛏ) 11:12, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I can let you know how this figure should have been higher. Population of Uttar Pradesh - 180 million , erstwhile Bihar 120 miilion , Madhya Pradesh - 90 Million , Rajasthan - 80 million , Delhi - 12 million and smatterings of Hindi speaking people all over the country e.g Mumbai at least 30% of 15 million = 5 million speak hindi as first language. Hindi as I believe in sheer numerical terms should be 2nd most populous language. Someone said Urdu being not intelligible to hindi people that is like saying US people do not understand UK english because it has a nasle twang to it.

Thanks

[edit] Pashto

According to the articles Pashto and Pashtun people, the number of Pashto-speakers is ca. 40m (35m being the lowest assumption, while 45m being the highest). This should be updated in this article which still states that Pashto has only 27m native speakers.

Tājik 20:10, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Presumably there are many people in Afghanistan (and perhaps in Pakistan as well) who speak Pashto without it being their native language. john k 03:47, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Actually ... no. There are many ethnic Pashtuns who have adopted either Persian (Afghanistan) or Urdu (Pakistan) as their native tongue, but Pashto - as a tribal language - has almost no influence on Persian, Urdu, or any other language of the region. Others usually do not learn Pashto. You'll find hardly any Non-Pashtun in Afghanistan who is fluent in Pashto, while almost every Pashtun in Afghanistan (especially those in larger cities) know speak Persian as good as their mother-tongue. The same is deffenitely true for Urdu in Pakistan.
Tājik 00:57, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
Then it's a problem with sources. We should try to cite reliable sources on the subject and figure out what the deal is. john k 17:22, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Number of English speakers

Can we make the numbers a little more concrete? How about using this. - Peregrinefisher 17:56, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

  • This article is only about native speakers. That article list second language speakers. Also, I don't think about.com is very reputable. Chris Quackenbush 10:22, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
What people forget is that a lot of imigrant families speak their language from birth, even their children born in an English speaking speak another language when a child and learn english at school. Another thing in the Indiginous people of these countries like the Yolngu language, Maori language, or Anishinaabe language. Enlil Ninlil 08:53, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] American Sign Language

Should ASL be considered in the list? although not a traditional language it does have 20mil 'speakers'.

  • Who are you ? You didn't sign your name :) Palx 14:56, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
  • ASL would be fine to include, except this article is about native speakers. That means anyone who has learned ASL as a second language is not elligible to be counted in the total. This would account for almost all the bilingual ASL/English speakers, so I suspect the population of ASL is much lower than the figure you mentioned. Chris Quackenbush 10:26, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Please also see my above comment under disputed sources and "How Many People Use ASL in the United States? Why Estimates Need Updating" (Mitchell et al. Sign Language Studies 6.3 (2006) p306-335) Chris Quackenbush 10:29, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] please revert unsourced changes

and cite sources for every bit of information here. It is a nightmare to fix this article if there is constant fiddling with numbers without comment or attribution. Edits such as this one, apparently made from some sort of gut conviction rather than a specific source, should be reverted on sight. dab (ᛏ) 11:09, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

SIL has:

1. Chinese (937,132,000)
2. Spanish (332,000,000)
3. English (322,000,000)
4. Bengali (189,000,000)
5. Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
6. Arabic (174,950,000)
7. Portuguese (170,000,000)
8. Russian (170,000,000)
9. Japanese (125,000,000)
10. German (98,000,000)
11. French (79,572,000)

Hindi estimates fluctuate particularly, placing Hindi/Urdu anywhere between 2nd and 5th place. dab (ᛏ) 11:18, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Yoruba

Err... Yoruba is the 24th AND the 45th language of the list AT THE SAME TIME! Could someone correct that please?
And by the way, in its own page, its the 49th most spoken language... XVoX 04:22, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

The mistake has been corrected, thank you. XVoX 06:45, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] vasque should be included

vasque or euskera is spoken in the Vasque Country and Navarra in the north of Spain, I don't know exactly the number of native speakers but it is an important lenguge in Spain.

As for Maninka language the order given is wrong. The article did not account for Maninka, Jula or Bamanankan speakers in Burkina Faso, in Ivory Coast and even in Gambia. I would like to take this remark into consideration.

The second remark is, in the classification, you seperated the Maninka and the Bambara, though they make the same language Mandekan. Assuming Maninka, Bamanankan and Jula are varieties of the same language, Bamanankan has 2.8 million native speakers plus 10 million second language speakers, making 13 million plus 3.3 million accounted for Maninka and all its varities would be estimated to 16.3 million. Accordingly, kindly take this fact into account when editing the page next time, speakers of Jula in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast are not still not accounted for.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../l/i/s/Talk%7EList_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers_4fde.html"