Talk:Malayo-Polynesian languages

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[edit] How many speakers?

The article says that "Western Malayo-Polynesian has about 300 million speakers", but the population of the Philippines (87million) and the population of Indonesia (242million) alone make 329 million. Malaysia adds another 24 million on. I know my method isn't scientific, but it seems there are more than 50 million people being ignored here. I know there are pockets of non-WMP-language speakers, but these would only account for the few million which represent the "more than" in the above "more than 50 million". So this leaves 50 million uncounted WMP speakers. Any objections to changing 300 to 350? Gronky 00:57, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

ok, I've made that change since it seems obvious - and no one has commented since I posted that question. Gronky 00:18, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

The question is how to define "speaker". Ideally, it would be best to have two numbers (or, rather, rough estimates, as that's the best one can hope for): the number of native speakers, and the number of total speakers. 69.140.12.199 03:40, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Malay vs. Malayic

On 1 June 2006 User:Wai Hong in the section Ethnologue Classification changed the listing of the group Malayic to Malay. Malayic is the Ethnologue name for a group of 70 languages which are dived into five subsets, one of the subsets of Malayic is Malay with one language, another is Malayan with fortysix languages, and a third is Malayic-Dayak with ten languages. I have restored the Ethnologue name. Bejnar 20:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)