I just saw an offhand reference (at Salon.com) the the fact that “Arabic stands as the fifth most widely spoken language in the world”. I am wondering what the top 5 or 10 are, in order.
Anyone?
Chinese
English
Spanish
French
I remember doing this in Spanish in school.
Thanks AndyJ, but I do want them in order.
French?!?!?!
Yeah I thought that. But you’ve got to think they had a lot of colonies.
Here’s a list: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774735.html
Sorry all. You can blame the poor UK education system for that one.
Depends on what you mean by “widely spoken.” The list brandocet linked to only gives people who use a language as their “first” one. English is almost certainly the most widely spoken, if you include people who speak it as a second (or third) language.
<major pet peeves>
The only reason they listed Hindi in 5th place and Urdu in 20th place is because they counted them as two separate languages. Whereas in fact Hindi and Urdu are the same language. Together they rank in 4th place. Elsewhere (I think in the <i>World Almanac</i>) I’ve seen rankings of world languages that combined them into one entry.
The other wrong on that list was breaking up Arabic into separate “languages”. “Arabic, Egyptian” “Arabic, Algerian” are the only ones that made it into the top 50. Those two alone added together would reach 15th place, but there are plenty of other Arabic dialects which added together would easily place unified Arabic in the top 10.
Another thing: Where is Malay/Indonesian on this list? Are you trying to tell me it has fewer speakers than Sindhi?
</major pet peeve>
I have serious problems with the SIL’s arbitrary criteria for drawing up this list, so take it with a grain of salt. There are other legitimate ways of evaluating language numbers that would produce very different results.
There’s no way to get them in order because the data does not exist in such a way that ranking, other than very rough ranking, is meaningful.
Defining language speakers is hard, defining what a language is is often hard etc. Further, defining usage is hard.
It’s to be taken with a large grain of salt.
E.g. see footnotes:
Then note the countries listed under Portuguese and French. For example, Burkina Faso. Nowhere near 1% of Burkina speaks French as a first language. Indeed throughout Francophone Africa general levels of French usage have been dropping.
Highly.
According to Bertilo Wennergren and Martin Weichert, the top five languages by number of speakers are:
Chinese (>1100 million)
English (>330 million)
Spanish (>300 million)
Hindi (>250 million)
Arabic (~200 million)
French (65 million) is only #13, between Korean (<70 million) and Tamil (65 million). Urdu is counted separately from Hindi, at >45 million; Sindhi at >15 million, and Malayalam at >30 million.
I’m not sure whether these numbers count only “mother-tongue” speakers or also include people who learned the language as a second/third language or have only partial fluency.
The figure for English seems a little low, given that the USA has 275 million people of whom most are English-speakers, Canada has 31 million of whom maybe 75% are English-speakers, the UK is, what, 50 million people?, Australia is 19 million, then there are the English-speakers in India, Ireland, South Africa, and elsewhere…
The sources appear to be from the CIA World Factbook and the SIL Ethnologue Database.
I was told recently that job opportunities to teach English as a second language in China are huge, and expanding because 400 million people in China are being taught English in schools. That is more than the number of people who speak English as a primary language, according to these statistics.
America should take a heads up from this, and begin second language teaching in elementary school, where it belongs, instead of making it a scholastic affectation in high school and college. We really aren’t dumber than the average Chinese, we just elect dummies to office, so we can ridicule them easier.
Tris
“Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.” ~ Zeuxis ~ (400 BC)
Please remember that the vast majority of Chinese speak Mandarin as a second language if at all. China has a huge number of mutually incomprehensible local dialects. The major dialects are classified (god knows what criteria they use) into 5-8 mutually incomprehensible groups. Cantonese, Fukienese, Shanghaiese and Sichuanese to name but a few of the dialects (forget the subdialects). I will say that most Chinese can understand basic spoken Mandarin thanks to radio and TV penetration.
Cracks me up to run into Chinese language students, who spend all their time in Beijing learning and being exposed to only Mandarin Chinese, when they get out into the boonies and can’t understand a word of the local speaking Mandarin with a strong local accent.
I agree with you in general (I wish I’d learned a second language in elementary school.), but your logic doesn’t make much sense. If everyone else is learning English, what language should English-speakers learn? Why? Two-thirds of all scientific papers are in English, nearly half of all business deals in Europe are in English, and a quarter of all people speak English.
True, some of that may depend on how you define English, (Does Tok Pisin count? How about the mangled English used in Asian advertisements?) but the trend is very clear: English is the world language.
As it says in the poem, ‘English is Mandarin’.
Just bought the World Almanac 2002 today. I can tell you what they are with the most recent data. These are the top 15:
Language/Speakers (millions)
Mandarin Chinese/874
Hindi/366
English/341
Spanish/322-58
Bengali/207
Portuguese/176
Russian/167
Japanese/125
German/100
Korean/78
French/77
Wu Chinese/77
Javanese/75
Yue Chinese/71
Telugu/69
Looking at Jellydonut’s numbers. Do that many people in China really speak Mandarin as a 1st language? And do only 70m or so speak Cantonese (“Yue”), if you include GD province plus half the suburbs of Toronto, etc, etc?
As a Hong Kong nationalist 
who dabbles in amateur linguistics, I would argue that the use of the word “dialects” to describe different variants of “Chinese” is politically motivated. It’s like saying Spanish and French are different dialects of Italian. (But what would you expect from people who can’t handle the idea of splitting their country into more than one time-zone?)
“A language is a dialect with an army”
bu ke neng or no frickin way do that many people speak Mandarin as a first language. Maybe a couple hundred million. Sheesh, go to Beijing, supposedly the center of mandarin speakers, and try to understand the language spoken on the street between two Beijingese. They speak a dialect of Mandarin, maybe not that far out there, but it sure isn’t broadcast news Mandarin.
Cantonese really is just HK/Guangdong Province and a few million of the Cantonese diaspora. Most of the Cantonese diaspora from 50-150 years ago speak dialects like Taishan or Foshan or something.
“Wu” Chinese. Not sure is that “Hu”, which would be Shanghaiese? Again, it breaks down into dialect pretty fast as you get more than about 10 miles out of Shanghai…But I’m not a linguist
I remember seeing a dialect map of China not too long ago. It showed a few varieties of Mandarin spread out over north and central China. I think they are using a rather loose definition of Mandarin, perhaps mutually intelligible dialects, not quite “broadcasting” Mandarin, but hey, go to England and try to find people speaking BBC English.
Perhaps they are counting people who learn Mandarin as a second language (dialect?). Anyway, it’s better than clumping all the dialects into one “Chinese” as non-linguists are apt to do.
And yes, I think dialect is an appropriate term. It is often convenient for linguists to use definitions based on the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding languages, dialects, etc. That is why Mandarin and Cantonese are considered dialects, but Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are separate languages, despite being pretty mutually intelligible (altho that is hindered by the Danish language’s seemingly random placement of glottal stops, but that’s besides the point).
In my experience, linguists politely note the convention by which the separate Chinese languages are referred to as dialects, and then skip right on over that foolishness and call a language a language.
Hell, according to O’Grady and Dobrovolsky 1996, not only are Mandarin and Cantonese separate languages, they’re far enough apart to be in separate language subfamilies of the Sinitic branch.
It seems strange that English is listed as only having 330 million people who speak it as their first language. According to the CIA fact book, the UK has a population of over 59 million, and the USA has over 278 million. I know both countries have a lot of people who don’t speak English as their first language, but wouldn’t they be made up for by other countries where English is the primary language (like Canada and Jamaica)?