I'm a little confused by that too. If someone wants to dig into the source data, perhaps this can be explained. For some reason, with Ethnologue's latest update, a few languages were splintered. For example, the various dialects of Arabic were separated and I had to combine them. Similarly, Bavarian was listed as different than German. Perhaps some variant of Thai was broken off as well, but the Wikipedia list doesn't show enough languages to find this out.
Looks like there are transcription errors on the Wikipedia article as compared with the underlying source data (https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/ethnologue200). Some of the totals are way off, including Thai (as noted above). The actual list should begin: #1 English (1,132M), #2 Mandarin (1,117M), #3 Hindi (614M), #4 Arabic (593M combined), #5 Spanish (534M). The full list of the the top 75 from the Ethnologue data, with the same combinations/groupings as on this quiz, is here: https://pastebin.com/WgPqYwFZ
Right. I'm not making a normative point about what the list and speaker totals should be. I'm simply saying that the Wikipedia page purports to cite Ethnologue but at least some of the figures are wrong -- e.g., the entries for Japanese, Western Punjabi, and Korean are the same as the overall Ethnologue totals that as you point out include L1 and L2. I now see that another Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers) does claim to include the L1/L2 breakdown, but there, too, it's evident that there are problems with the data. Maybe that page is at least a better source to link to given the greater transparency about what's actually reported in Ethnologue? It's a tricky topic, for sure.
Much of the Ethnologue data is hidden behind a pay wall. Someone at Wikipedia was able to get at it and put it on Wikipedia but we don't have access to it unfortunately. That said, the numbers on Wikipedia appear to be accurate.
I was confused as well. But looking into it a little more, I can see where they got their numbers. Apparently, the official language of Thailand is actually "Central Thai" which is only spoken natively in the central part of Thailand, with various other languages spoken in other parts.
If you know about the history of language, this isn't surprising. For example, what we think of today is French was really only spoken in the area around Paris prior to the French revolution. Other people spoke the languages of their own region such as Breton, Alsatian, and of course Occitan. It took two centuries of coercion by the central government before French became the native tongue of nearly everyone in the country.
Wikipedia lists Northern Thai (6 million) and Southern Thai (4.5 million) as different languages. In addition there's Isan language with 20 million speakers in Thailand, apparently. Not sure if there are any other sources that agree with this than Ethnologue (which seems like the main source of Wikipedia's speaker data).
I don't understand your comment. The source separated the two. I put them back together. Since you agree with me that Bavarian is a dialect, not a language, then my decision to combine Bavarian and German was not unnecessary.
I think what Tante means is that even mentioning Bavarian seems ridiculous, as no one considers it to be separate from German. (However, looking at the source, linguists seem to differ. That's news to me.)
Then a percentage of every countries population should be subtracted from the native language numbers. e.g. Not everyone in India speaks Hindi in the Hindi areas or Urdu in the Urdu areas, or Gujarati in the Gujarati areas etc. etc...... you should only use populations for countries, not try and estimate how many are not native speakers with certain countries but not others.
Kurdish is missing on this list. According to the source Northern Kurdish has 14.6 million speakers. Wikipedia also states that Central Kurdish has 7.5 million speakers and Southern Kurdish has 3 million speakers. That amounts to more than 25 million speakers.
Heh. I get the logo, it was in the Bible that stated that they all spoke different languages after all that quarreling, since they didn't understand what they're saying.
Bavarian is not a language of its own, it's only a dialect. Either take em all (Frisian, Alemann, Cologne-ian, Rhine-ian, Saxonian etc pp) or leave em all...
Missed my own first language and the wife's as well. Just figured there weren't enough of either of us to make it on the list but now I feel quite dumb
Igbo, Sudanese, Uzbek and Amharic I refuse to believe are more spoken than Swahili. There are roughly 71-135 million Swahili speakers, it is approximately the 13th most spoken language in the world.
But most French speakers in African countries speak it as a second language, and not everyone in countries with French as an official language actually speaks French
As a Chinese, I'd say that Cantonese, Hakka and Wu can indeed be seen as languages for they have unique words, characters, grammers and sounds (what is Wu remains to be discussed), but Xiang, Jin, Min Nan and Gan are definitely dialects, for they just pronounce a little bit different from Mandarin, and they don't have unique grammers and characters. Name of these dialects are also typical Mandarin pinyin. Compared with them, Chuan (Sichuan) dialect and Shaanxi dielect are no less different from Mandarin.
Dam! I just can't spell Amharic! It's ok if you don't remember all the Chinese/Indian regional languages, but l just don't quite know how l remember Tagalog and Nigeria's big three tongues yet forgot Japanese, Javanese, Korean and Ukrainian... Pressure, pressure.
That's wrong population of the US is 320 million
Population of UK is 65 million
Population of Canada is 35 million
Population of Australia is 23 million
Population of New Zealand is 8 million
Population of Ireland is 5 million
Should be 456 million native English speakers
Some Kiwis speak maori
some Americans speak spanish
India: Yes
India is definitely leading
Just a little suggestion❤