Yup don’t forget that most of Central Africa was at one time a French or Belgian colony. Nigeria alone has more than 100 million people. Cameroon, Tunisia, Algeria all have large French speaking populations (usually as a 2nd language).
In fact if you’re travelling through Africa it’s probably better to speak French in some countries than English.
For Chinese, I think it’s fair to say that they lump anyone together that uses a written form of Chinese as speaking “Chinese”, regardless of how it’s pronounced. Certainly newspaper Chinese in China, HK, Taiwan and Singapore not to mention the overseas Chinese communities should probably all be considered various dialects of written Chinese.
Yep, fair point by JellyDonut, people from Muswell Hills in London (the Kinks) certainly speak a dialect of English that a Californian finds almost unintelligible. But seriously, my entire Chinese language life I was taught that Beijingese is the bees knees. Almost 20 years after first studying Chinese, about 15 years of living in HK, Taiwan and Southwest China, I finally made my first trip to Beijing about 2 years ago. It was like learning BBC english and rapping with Muswell Hill homeboys.
But was not a French colony.
Bad example. The official language in Nigeria is English. (It was an English colony until 1960) (according to CIA)
It’s true that French can be usefull in northern Africa, but in the south/central parts it is rapidly losing ground to English. You will still find people talking it, but nowhere near as many as there will be people talking English.
I believe this is related to the way the French ran their colonies. The English tried at an early point to install ‘local’ governements (ruled from London, but with a local contingency of English speaking ‘indigenous’ administration). When the English left there was already an English speaking administration in place.
The French, however, came with large armies and ruled everything. When they left there was nothing left to build from, so people started local governements speaking ‘local’ languages.
(Note, all this is of course very simplified, but this was the view held by a book I cannot remember the name of)
In general, the easiest fairly accurate source for facts on the world’s languages on the Internet is Ethnologue (www.sil.org/ethnologue). They used to have a webpage with a list of the top 107 languages (all those with more than 7 million speakers). Unfortunately, when I did a web search for this page just now, I found that they have taken this particular page down. There was a cached version of the page though on Google. Given that they don’t have it up on Ethnologue anymore, the numbers are probably several years out of date. They don’t combine Hindi and Urdu, which they probably should have done, since they’re mutually comprehensible. They also don’t combine the Chinese “dialects,” which makes sense since they’re not mutually comprehensible. I have no idea whether it makes sense to split up the various varieties of Arabic. Are they mutually incomprehensible? Here’s the list, in any case:
1 CHINESE, MANDARIN [CHN] China 885,000,000
2 SPANISH [SPN] Spain 332,000,000
3 ENGLISH [ENG] United Kingdom 322,000,000
4 BENGALI [BNG] Bangladesh 189,000,000
5 HINDI [HND] India 182,000,000
6 PORTUGUESE [POR] Portugal 170,000,000
7 RUSSIAN [RUS] Russia 170,000,000
8 JAPANESE [JPN] Japan 125,000,000
9 GERMAN, STANDARD [GER] Germany 98,000,000
10 CHINESE, WU [WUU] China 77,175,000
11 JAVANESE [JAN] Indonesia, Java, Bali 75,500,800
12 KOREAN [KKN] Korea, South 75,000,000
13 FRENCH [FRN] France 72,000,000
14 VIETNAMESE [VIE] Viet Nam 67,662,000
15 TELUGU [TCW] India 66,350,000
16 CHINESE, YUE [YUH] China 66,000,000
17 MARATHI [MRT] India 64,783,000
18 TAMIL [TCV] India 63,075,000
19 TURKISH [TRK] Turkey 59,000,000
20 URDU [URD] Pakistan 58,000,000
21 CHINESE, MIN NAN [CFR] China 49,000,000
22 CHINESE, JINYU [CJY] China 45,000,000
23 GUJARATI [GJR] India 44,000,000
24 POLISH [PQL] Poland 44,000,000
25 ARABIC, EGYPTIAN SPOKEN [ARZ] Egypt 42,500,000
26 UKRAINIAN [UKR] Ukraine 41,000,000
27 ITALIAN [ITN] Italy 37,000,000
28 CHINESE, XIANG [HSN] China 36,015,000
29 MALAYALAM [MJS] India 34,022,000
30 CHINESE, HAKKA [HAK] China 34,000,000
31 KANNADA [KJV] India 33,663,000
32 ORIYA [ORY] India 31,000,000
33 PANJABI, WESTERN [PNB] Pakistan 30,000,000
34 SUNDA [SUO] Indonesia 27,000,000
35 PANJABI, EASTERN [PNJ] India 26,013,000
36 ROMANIAN [RUM] Romania 26,000,000
37 BHOJPURI [BHJ] India 25,000,000
38 AZERBAIJANI, SOUTH [AZB] Iran 24,364,000
39 FARSI, WESTERN [PES] Iran 24,280,000
40 MAITHILI [MKP] India 24,260,000
41 HAUSA [HUA] Nigeria 24,200,000
42 ARABIC, ALGERIAN SPOKEN [ARQ] Algeria 22,400,000
43 BURMESE [BMS] Myanmar 22,000,000
44 SERBO-CROATIAN [SRC] Yugoslavia 21,000,000
45 CHINESE, GAN [KNN] China 20,580,000
46 AWADHI [AWD] India 20,540,000
47 THAI [THJ] Thailand 20,047,000
48 DUTCH [DUT] Netherlands 20,000,000
49 YORUBA [YOR] Nigeria 20,000,000
50 SINDHI [SND] Pakistan 19,720,000
51 ARABIC, MOROCCAN SPOKEN [ARY] Morocco 19,542,000
52 ARABIC, SAIDI SPOKEN [AEC] Egypt 18,900,000
53 UZBEK, NORTHERN [UZB] Uzbekistan 18,466,000
54 MALAY [MLI] Malaysia, Peninsular 17,600,000
55 AMHARIC [AMH] Ethiopia 17,413,000
56 INDONESIAN [INZ] Indonesia 17,050,000
57 IGBO [IGR] Nigeria 17,000,000
58 TAGALOG [TGL] Philippines 17,000,000
59 NEPALI [NEP] Nepal 16,056,000
60 ARABIC, SUDANESE SPOKEN [APD] Sudan 16,000,000
61 SARAIKI [SKR] Pakistan 15,015,000
62 CEBUANO [CEB] Philippines 15,000,000
63 ARABIC, NORTH LEVANTINE SPOKEN [APC] Syria 15,000,000
64 THAI, NORTHEASTERN [TTS] Thailand 15,000,000
65 ASSAMESE [ASM] India 14,634,000
66 HUNGARIAN [HNG] Hungary 14,500,000
67 CHITTAGONIAN [CIT] Bangladesh 14,000,000
68 ARABIC, MESOPOTAMIAN SPOKEN [ACM] Iraq 13,900,000
69 MADURA [MHJ] Indonesia, Java, Bali 13,694,000
70 SINHALA [SNH] Sri Lanka 13,220,000
71 HARYANVI [BGC] India 13,000,000
72 MARWARI [MKD] India 12,104,000
73 CZECH [CZC] Czech Republic 12,000,000
74 GREEK [GRK] Greece 12,000,000
75 MAGAHI [MQM] India 12,000,000
76 CHHATTISGARHI [HNE] India 10,985,000
77 DECCAN [DCC] India 10,709,800
78 CHINESE, MIN BEI [MNP] China 10,537,000
79 BELARUSAN [RUW] Belarus 10,200,000
80 ZHUANG, NORTHERN [CCX] China 10,000,000
81 ARABIC, NAJDI SPOKEN [ARS] Saudi Arabia 9,800,000
82 PASHTO, NORTHERN [PBU] Pakistan 9,685,000
83 SOMALI [SOM] Somalia 9,472,000
84 MALAGASY [MEX] Madagascar 9,398,700
85 ARABIC, TUNISIAN SPOKEN [AEB] Tunisia 9,308,000
86 RWANDA [RUA] Rwanda 9,306,800
87 ZULU [ZUU] South Africa 9,142,000
88 BULGARIAN [BLG] Bulgaria 9,000,000
89 SWEDISH [SWD] Sweden 9,000,000
90 LOMBARD [LMO] Italy 8,974,000
91 OROMO, WEST-CENTRAL [GAZ] Ethiopia 8,920,000
92 PASHTO, SOUTHERN [PBT] Afghanistan 8,206,000
93 KAZAKH [KAZ] Kazakhstan 8,000,000
94 ILOCANO [ILO] Philippines 8,000,000
95 TATAR [TTR] Russia 8,000,000
96 FULFULDE, NIGERIAN [FUV] Nigeria 7,611,000
97 ARABIC, SANAANI SPOKEN [AYN] Yemen 7,600,000
98 UYGHUR [UIG] China 7,595,512
99 HAITIAN CREOLE FRENCH [HAT] Haiti 7,372,000
100 AZERBAIJANI, NORTH [AZE] Azerbaijan 7,059,000
101 NAPOLETANO-CALABRESE [NPL] Italy 7,047,400
102 KHMER, CENTRAL [KMR] Cambodia 7,039,200
103 FARSI, EASTERN [PRS] Afghanistan 7,000,000
104 AKAN [TWS] Ghana 7,000,000
105 HILIGAYNON [HIL] Philippines 7,000,000
106 KURMANJI [KUR] Turkey 7,000,000
107 SHONA [SHD] Zimbabwe 7,000,000
I submit that the 16 million people listed here as speakers of Lombard and Napoletano-Calabrese would describe themselves as Italian speakers.
So where did these numbers come from?
chinese may be the most spoken, but 90% of the world’s telephone calls are made in english
This is riddled with errors, or at least highly debatable classifications of “languages” or whatever you want to call them:
Portuguese is the official language of 7 countries and one territory:
Portugal
Brazil
Angola
Mozambique
Cape Verde
Guinea-Bissau
Sao Tome and Principe
Some sources claim 200 million Portuguese speakers in the world.
…and I thought my OP was a fairly straightforward question! Sheesh, I didn’t realize all the fine points of classification.
Indeed, here are the CIA population numbers.
10,048,232 Portugal
172,860,370 Brazil
10,145,267 Angola
19,104,696 Mozambique
401,343 Cape Verde
1,285,715 Guinea-Bissau
159,883 Sao Tome and Principe
445,594 Macao (with Chinese)
214,451,100 Total
All are listed as having Portugese as the primary and official language. Given that Portuguese is virutally the only language in Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe and that it is the primary language of the others 185 million to 190 million native speakers seems likely.
It’s a very big muddle. As somebody already noted Hindi and Urdu aren’t combined. They are phonetically the same, but are written with different scripts (Arabic vs. Devenagari), which creates some justification for keeping them separate, in addition to the political reasons. The last time I looked at one of those almanac lists, one of the footnotes said that Yiddish was a dialect of German, in spite of having it’s own literary and cultural traditions, and was counted with German. I believe that is another debateable point, although Yiddish is generally intelligible to German speakers. Intelligibility is not a very clean division.
Speaking in the strictest linguistic sense, the different “dialects” of Chinese are really different languages, and cases may be made for Brazilian Portuguese, Sardinian, and the “dialects” of Arabic. But sociopolitical circumstances factor in to how a language is described in relation to other languages. That’s why some people (who in my mind are off their rockers) try to separate Serbian and Croatian, which are pronounced exactly alike with different scripts.
Chinese deserves to be grouped together in a way closer than a family but further than a language, because all the languages/dialects/whatevers use the same orthography, and thus you could read a Beijing newspaper in Shanghai, a Shanghai newspaper in Hong Kong, and a Hong Kong newspaper in Wuhan, etc. etc. etc. I read somewhere that if Confucius were to come alive again, nobody would be able to understand a word he said, but if he jotted something down on a piece of paper, he would be well understood.
But, lacking a good descriptive term for these dialects/languages/whatevers, linguists just use the term “dialect” and understand that when speaking of Chinese, “dialect” doesn’t mean “dialect” in the same sense as other languages.
Jelly, if all English speakers and all French speakers decided to use an ideographic writing system (in which, say, the same sign was pronounced bread in English and pain in French) would that mean that English and French should be grouped more closely together than they are?
My first grader is taking Spanish offered through his school, one hour a week right after school. It was an extra $200, but that’s not too bad. I think there are only eight students (out of about 400-500 total in the school). This may have been the first year it was offered, however.
I agreed with you twenty years ago. Now, it seems clear there is a significant number of Spanish speakers in the US, and I expect the percentage to grow.
Well, no. Cabo Verde the actual living language is a Portuguese creole, Crioullu if I’m spelling is right. I believe this is the case with Sao Tome. Having been to West Africa I can attest the number of Portuguese speakers, mother tongue, is quite low. Situation in Angola and Mozambique may be different, but I doubt it. Perhaps one gains a few thousand. So, maybe 160/170 k speakers.
Now, as for Arabic dialects I don’t know how one wants to count that. Egyptian is widely understood, yes. It does share a lot of morphological similarities with Shami dialects, but Northern Egyptian certainly is not just the same as Khaliji. Loss of the Qaf, use of different forms of hatha/hathihi, different future tense marker. Etc.
As for Maghribi vs Jazairi: I certainly notice a difference. More so with Tunisian but they’re not ‘just the same.’ On the other hand, the variation probably falls close enough say they are dialects of a language (Maghrebi Arabic) since as far as I have noticed they use more or less the same grammatical structure, same articles, same or variants of the same future tense marker, etc.
Of course, I’m not a trained linguist.
A pedant’s delight, this subject…
I’m obviously out of touch with S American population growth rates. Where the f**k did all those Brazilians come from??? Still, how many people in Mozambique/Angola/etc actually speak Portuguese these days? Virtually none, I bet. I go to Macau regularly, and it’s as good as dead there.
jellydonut - the reason you can read a Beijing newspaper in HK (assuming you can remember the wretched simplified characters) is because it is written in Mandarin. All respectable Chinese writing is Mandarin, just as everyone wrote in Latin throughout medieval France, Spain, etc. The trashy stuff in HK (like porno comics, advertising) is written in the vernacular (just like, uh, the medieval porno comics were) 
Just want to point out that Chinese is not considered ideographic. I think they call it logographic, because for the most part the characters have little relation to what they represent (which if often just morphemes).
As for ETHNOLOGUE–others have pointed out, and I completely concur, that ETHNOLOGUE seems to too readily break different dialects (or even just names of a tongue) into different languages.
Now I’m getting really pissed off at SIL. They’ve broken Arabic into microfragments. What does it matter that Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf all speak distinct dialects? They all share a high level of mutual intelligibility. For that matter, separating Moroccan and Algerian dialects into different “languages” is not only daft, it’s dishonest. A lie. There is more mutual comprehension between these Arabic dialects than between some dialects of English. Take someone from the backwoods of Alabama and put him in a room with someone from Northumberland and see how well they understand each other. For that matter, SIL completely ignores the existence of Modern Standard Arabic, which is understood by educated Arabs in every country, and by plenty of uneducated ones as well. There’s only one major dialectal divide involving loss of mutual comprehensibility: between the Maghribi dialect group (Mauretania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) and the rest of the dialects. Libya is a transitional zone.
Worse, much worse: they’ve listed Malay and Indonesian separately. Malay and Indonesian are the same damn language. Combined, they would rank in 29th place instead of 54th and 56th.
The same with treating “Eastern Farsi” (Persian of Iran) and “Western Farsi” (Dari of Afghanistan) as two languages. Again, they’re the same language; the dialectal difference between them is like the difference between British and American English.
SIL is a front organization for Protestant Christian missionaries. They started all this language stuff in order to get the Bible translated into as many languages as possible and to prepare missionaries for using more and more languages. They have an agenda which is not purely linguistic science.
By treating major European languages as unified wholes, putting them near the top of the list, while breaking up languages of brown peoples like Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and Malay into fragments, diluting their perceived strength and significance, SIL is not only dishonest—they are perpetuating racism.
I don’t get the figures for English.
USA = 275 Million
Great Britian 60 Million
Canada = 17 Million
Aussie = 15 million
NZ = 3 millon
That is 375 million alone.
I realize not everyone speaks English in the USA but those estimates must be low. Those figures above were from an old World Book.
Even if 1% of India spoke English you would have 10,000,000 more.