The 10 most spoken languages in the world

[willemvanoranje]

don't forget that hundreds of millions of Chinese speak English as well...most English speaking people can be found in China!

 

[andrewgprv]

From reading the descriptions it sounds like they are NOT only counting first languages.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Originally posted by SeleucusNicator
Yeah, most of the versions I've seen count Hindi and Urdu as seperate languages (has the concept of Hinduistani been taken seriously by anyone since the late 1940's?) and certainly don't count the Malay-Indonesian dialects as a single language.

Someone once said, a "language is just a dialect with a government and an army"

 

[SeleucusNicator]

Originally posted by calgacus

Someone once said, a "language is just a dialect with a government and an army"

Malaysia and Indonesia do not come to mind immediately when one thinks of great armed powers.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Originally posted by addiv

I was wondering about that too. Because I've got a list with somewhat lower numbers, and Japanese and German in the top 10, instead of French and Malayan. But maybe my list is a bit dated...
It's interesting to note btw, that 7 of the top 10 languages are Indo-European.

The list seems to be for secondary AND primary speakers:

My World Almanac tells me, for 1st language speakers:

1. Mandarin - 874 Million
2. Hindi - 366 Million
3. English - 341 Million
4. Spanish - 322-358 Million
5. Bengali - 207 Million
6. Portuguese - 176 Million
7. Russian (excluding Ukrainian) - 167 Million
8. Japanese - 125 Million
9. German (standard) - 100 Million
10. Korean - 78 Million

Followed by French, Wu, Javanese, Yue, Telugu, Marathi, Vietnamese, Tamil, Italian and Urdu.

Ethnologue - a great source - has the following figures:

1 CHINESE, MANDARIN [CHN] China 885,000,000
2 SPANISH 332,000,000
3 ENGLISH 322,000,000
4 BENGALI 189,000,000
5 HINDI 182,000,000
6 PORTUGUESE 170,000,000
7 RUSSIAN 170,000,000
8 JAPANESE 125,000,000
9 GERMAN, STANDARD 98,000,000
10 CHINESE, WU 77,175,000
11 JAVANESE 75,500,800
12 KOREAN 75,000,000
13 FRENCH 72,000,000
14 VIETNAMESE 67,662,000
15 TELUGU 66,350,000
16 CHINESE, YUE 66,000,000
17 MARATHI 64,783,000
18 TAMIL 63,075,000
19 TURKISH 59,000,000
20 URDU 58,000,000

It's interestinging that Malayo-Indonesian isn't regarded as a language.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Originally posted by SeleucusNicator


Malaysia and Indonesia do not come to mind immediately when one thinks of great armed powers.

Sure! But the Romance "languages" sure do.

 

[fastspawn]

The list seems to be for secondary AND primary speakers:

My World Almanac tells me, for 1st language speakers:

1. Mandarin - 874 Million
2. Hindi - 366 Million
3. English - 341 Million
4. Spanish - 322-358 Million
5. Bengali - 207 Million
6. Portuguese - 176 Million
7. Russian (excluding Ukrainian) - 167 Million
8. Japanese - 125 Million
9. German (standard) - 100 Million
10. Korean - 78 Million

Followed by French, Wu, Javanese, Yue, Telugu, Marathi, Vietnamese, Tamil, Italian and Urdu.

Ethnologue - a great source - has the following figures:

1 CHINESE, MANDARIN [CHN] China 885,000,000
2 SPANISH 332,000,000
3 ENGLISH 322,000,000
4 BENGALI 189,000,000
5 HINDI 182,000,000
6 PORTUGUESE 170,000,000
7 RUSSIAN 170,000,000
8 JAPANESE 125,000,000
9 GERMAN, STANDARD 98,000,000
10 CHINESE, WU 77,175,000
11 JAVANESE 75,500,800
12 KOREAN 75,000,000
13 FRENCH 72,000,000
14 VIETNAMESE 67,662,000
15 TELUGU 66,350,000
16 CHINESE, YUE 66,000,000
17 MARATHI 64,783,000
18 TAMIL 63,075,000
19 TURKISH 59,000,000
20 URDU 58,000,000

There are 220 million people in Indonesia, and 20 million in Malaysia. Assuming we take Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu as two distinct languages, which they are not (well unless you count English spoken by Texans and Jamaicans as two distinct languages)

we get 220 million indonesians, factor in probably 80% of them speak their national language (Under Sukarno, i would think the figure is closer 99%) there would leave about 180 million. It doesn't figure into the almanac.

Your almanac doesn't have Arabic anywhere also.

Strangely enough it has Javanese. I would assume it is talking about Boyanese which is a dialect of Indonesia.

After a quick search from ethnologue, i found the reason.

Javanese is taken as a first language (mother tongue) Bahasa Indonesia is taken as 2nd (which is not in the report.)

Essentially both of them are from the same tree.
Indonesian: Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian, Sundic, Malayic, Malayan, Local Malay.
Javanese:Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian, Sundic, Javanese.

anyway, Indonesian is counted as having only 30 million speakers as a first language. but 140 million as a second language within Java itself

source
http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp

For Arabic, it is broken up into many categories
from Algerian Saharan to Western Egyptian due to their spoken method.

Strangely enough English is not broken up even though the variation could be very large.
Figure for English is 341 million first language, 508 million second (1999)http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ENG


However i think Ethnologue is not very accurate, because most of the time they use figures from 20 years ago.

 

[Achinz]

Very prone to bias, this exercise. One native Hindi speaker has put Hindi second at 800 M speakers claiming that it's

spoken in Uttar Pradesh,_ Madhya Pradesh, _ ________________________________________ Jhar Khand, Uttar Anchal, Bihar, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Chattisgarh)

but I suspect he may not be concerned solely with "primary" speakers.
__ ________________________________________

 

[Pangur Bán]

@fastspawn: it obviously doesn't regard Arabic or Indonesian as one language. Not my fault.

 

[Lord_Sidious]

you're right

 

[Sarevok]

Originally posted by MrPresident
Are you counting only the first language a person speaks? Because if you include second languages then I believe English is the most spoken language in the world.

indeed. That is almost a certainty

 

[Enkidu Warrior]

Arabic could potentially be considered to be several different languages due to the many regional versions (though I wouldn't have thought so). Also, arabic speakers who only do so to read the Koran are reading a very old dialect of arabic and aren't necessarily fluent in modern arabic.

 

[Alvaro da Luna]

Originally posted by Enkidu Warrior
Arabic could potentially be considered to be several different languages due to the many regional versions (though I wouldn't have thought so). Also, arabic speakers who only do so to read the Koran are reading a very old dialect of arabic and aren't necessarily fluent in modern arabic.

Because most Arabs have read the Koran, they are fluent in that dialect also and can understand outsiders trying to speak it. They can conceivably have a conversation based on that old dialect.

 

[JtheJackal]

Is that old arabic in the same sense of reading Shakespeare in old English?

 

[Achinz]

Originally posted by willemvanoranje
don't forget that hundreds of millions of Chinese speak English as well...most English speaking people can be found in China!

I would query this claim.

A better case can be made for India as having the most number of English speaking people.

 

[Vancouver 2010]

Canadians don't speak English!

Canadians speak Canadian, eh? (Basically, English Plus, eh? Where every sentence ends in "eh", eh?)

The list does seem pretty accurate though... for primary languages. It's probably not too accurate if you include secondary languages though.

 

[Dann]

Originally posted by Vancouver2010
Canadians don't speak English!

Canadians speak Canadian, eh? (Basically, English Plus, eh? Where every sentence ends in "eh", eh?)

Similar to Cantonese English, where every sentence ends either with "lah" or "loh".

 

[Evertonian]

I'm surprised some of the figures given for Mandarin are so low. They seem to be coming in about 350 million less than the actual population of China. Even people I've met from Guangzhou (in theory a strongly cantonese-language area) all basically have 2 first languages, thanks to the prominence of Mandarin in the education system etc.

 

[ottomankhadi]

16 CHINESE, YUE 66,000,000
17 MARATHI 64,783,000
18 TAMIL 63,075,000
19 TURKISH 59,000,000
......
our population is nearly 75000000 and Khazakistan Kýrgýzistan Uzbekistan Turkmenistan are speaking the accents of turkish..it's nearly 200000000 people....

 

[Lord_Sidious]

it's that possible?