Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers/Archive 4

message: I think that the english language is being slightly short handed in this article... Ok, if English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Belize, the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Guyana, Isle of Man, Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, Nauru, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Ireland (Hiberno-English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom (various forms of British English), the U.S. Virgin Islands the United States (various forms of American English), and Zimbabwe.. then we should probably up the number of primary speakers of English by..... ALOT...... If the US is going on 300 million people, the united kingdom 60 million, australia 50 million... that passed the 400 million mark already and that's not including the other heap of countries that were just listed. I'm not saying that everyone in these countries only speak english or that it's their primary language, but the overwhelming majority of people in each one of these countries speak english as their main language..... And even if someone started with a particular language as a child, the goal is to identify their primary language, as in the most used and applied language to daily life. If you speak spanish to a handful of relatives, and speak english just as well to the rest of the world... I think it's safe to say that English is a primary language, or maybe a person could have 2 primary languages.... You can check wikipedia.com or other census verifying websites to any of the info I've displayed. Another intersting topic would probably be the influence of the enlgish language throughout the world and how english television, music, the internet, and other mediums greatly expand the engish language's territory.
--
Check your facts before disputing the wikipedia. You claim Australia as 50M people, but it is only 20M https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html Crispincowan 01:27, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: English

message: Naturally this article is affected by systemic bias. For ethnologue not to consider blacks or africans as native speakers of a european language is typical Systemic bias. Almost all countries in africa use a combination of local languages and European languages(principally french, english, and portuguese). In my home country of Zambia English is the official language, which means all official and government business is conducted in english. All newspapers and majority of television and radio shows are in English. The entire education system from primary school to university is in english. Essentially any     who can read or write knows english. This obviously convienient as there almost 72 local dialects.  That said Zambians are very proud of their local languages and almost every     speaks or understands at least three languages by default- Bemba, Nyanja and English. Most Zambians will switch languages effortlessly depending on the situation eg when speaking to older people or people from rural areas one would use local languages, conversly when speaking with younger people or at work one would use english. I would best describe the use of english as a spectrum or some kind of uniform distribution. There is a small minority on one end who have completely no understanding of english and small minority of on the other end who use english exclusively. The majority in the middle have some ability to use both.  
Back to systemic bias as I have digressed quite a bit. The belief in the west is that native speakers of english are only found in the US, UK, Canada and Australia(Basically white britons and british immigrants). Slowly these misconceptions are begining to change. The outsourcing of millions of jobs from the US and Europe to English speaking India is a case in point. In the next half century it is likely that there will be more french speakers in Africa than the rest of the world combined. This due to rising populations in francophone africa.
::Yes, I completely take your point. As I said above re the Ivory Coast, I still find it strange that independence didnt lead to a rejection of English/French - when a country in Europe becomes independent one of the first things the new government does is promote the local language/dialect at the expense of the "language of oppression" (even when there is hardly any difference, as in the former Yugoslavia). 
What do you think will happen in two or three generations time? Will English still be widely spoken in Zambia or will it have been replaced as the language of government and the media by a lingua franca based on an African language? As is happening gradually with Sango in the Central African Republic, for example. Jameswilson 22:42, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Native speakers

message: Bye, folks. I'm leaving the grid for the next year. I've become the default (some would say self-appointed) maintainer of this article, but I won't be able to do this any longer. I'm hoping some of you out there in the wings will take over. This list could really go to seed if we don't keep on top of it -- basically just reverting the steady stream of unsubstantiated edits in populations and where spoken. kwami 17:23, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Leaving the grid 

message: As I stated some time ago, Turkish is currently not an official language in Bulgaria. After all, I am from Bulgaria, and I would have been the first to know if our constitution had been changed. Yes, I know it's listed as "regional" language on some sites, but this doesn't change the facts. I will repeat what I said before: a lot of people speak Turkish here (can't recall the exact percentage), but for now Bulgarian is the only official language. If you look at the Bulgaria page in Wikipedia, you'll see that it alsa says so. The Constitution of Bulgaria says so too. So let's keep the information in this article correct. --Mégara (Мегъра) - D. Mavrov 20:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turkish in Bulgaria 

message: :308 million native (2004 CIA)
I presume that "CIA" refers to the online CIA World Factbook. But I cannot find any statistics there that refer specifically to the number of native English speakers. On the other hand, I did find this reference for a number of native English speakers equalling 322 million. (Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999)). If some     cannot give me a clear link to/reference for the figure of 308 million, I will replace it with the claim and reference I have. --Susurrus 08:00, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It should be noted that 2 billion people can speak at least some English.Cameron Nedland 23:19, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you can give a reliable source for the figure, go ahead. The current figure in the table (515 million) seems way too low (see List of countries by English speaking population). -- Avenue 10:25, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It was on the English language article for a whileand I have a book called Human: The Definitive Visual Guide to prove it.Cameron Nedland 23:05, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

text: To prove what?  The 515 million is low, based on the Ethnologue which is not really interested in keeping its data on English up-to-date, apparently.  But 2 billion?  Maybe if you included everyone who can say "Hello", okay.  But certainly not that many are able to carry on a simple conversation in English, much less consider themselves fluent for purposes of work, research, and so on.  I've been trying to find reliable numbers all evening on the web, and so far I'm turning up empty.  Is no one interested in trying to research this topic?  MrAldrich 01:36, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Given that no reliable numbers can be found at the moment, I have replaced the unrealistic number of second language English speakers by a wide range estimate (as done in English language): 150 million–1.5 billion. Marcoscramer 18:46, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of Native English Speakers 

message: I say why not use calculations or estimates from The World Factbook (2006 Edition) to settle the dispute this page rages from time to time?. AshrafSS 17:19, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using The World Factbook 

message: Why are Cantonese and other languages included as part of Chinese when they are plainly different languages from Mandarin? (Stpaul 11:30, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hay so there the same, ok so we lump all the Germanic, Romance, Afro-asiatic, Australian Aboriginal languages together, HAY they sound the same to me. Please leave politice out and use proper linguistic supplied references and sources. Enlil Ninlil 04:59, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Chinese

message: Something is clearly wrong. English should be #1 because 2 billion people speak it to some degree, where as 'Chinese' is a highly fragmented set of loosely related languages. By that criteria English again be on top because you'd have to add German, Dutch and the Scandanavian languages.Cameron Nedland 02:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This list is based on the number of native speakers of the various languages, not anyone who can "speak it to some degree'. Our table breaks Chinese into some of its component languages, and with 872 native speakers Mandarin would still be first by a long way. Or do you believe Mandarin is also a collection of languages? If so, please provide a source for the claim. This list tries to follow local perceptions of what is a language and what is a dialect, but the Chinese situation is apparently quite contentious (see e.g. Identification of the varieties of Chinese).  -- Avenue 10:18, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  WTF? 

message: Insert non-formatted text here
umm... I noticed it says on the page and some other pages that spanish is third (sometimes fourth) whilst english is fourth (sometimes third) yet most pages on the internet and some books put it at either number two or three. Are the internet sites and books misguided, if not can someone fix it. I would but I can't really be bothered. 
here are some links I found:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html (-this one refers to ethnologue too)
http://www.linguasphere.org/language.html
http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0724-unesco.html
p.s. and the numbers on the page don't add up if u tally up the populations of the nations mentioned(AND counting india at about 300 million etc.) some one should really fix, I would but I can't be bothered.
:This page uses the number of native speakers. The first and second of your links only give total figures including non-native speakers. The third ranks based on the midpoint of a range, and I'm not sure that their ranges are equally fair to all the languages you mention. So it's not as simple as you make it sound. -- Avenue 08:47, 23 July 2006
(UTC)
::Even if we stick to native speakers only, English should be ahead of Spanish in the ranking. The Wikipedia article underestimates the number of native English speakers outside the US, Canada, the British Isles, and Australia/New Zealand, just as it underestimates for that matter the number of native Francophones outside France, Belgium/Switzerland, and Canada. Conversely, the article overestimates the number of native Spanish speakers in Spain and Latin America (where Spanish is NOT the first language of a significant percentage of the population) and probably also overstates the number of native speakers of Spanish in the US based on the ambiguous question on "language most often spoken at home" in the US census. BTW, exaggerating the number of speakers of a given language for nationalistic reasons is a recurrent problem in the Wikipedia: in addition to Spanish or Chinese, figures for native speakers of languages such as German, Portuguese, Irish Gaelic and many others have also been inflated. Since it is difficult to determine precisely what a native speaker means, one c     ways conceivably come up with some kind of head count that will suit his/her intended target figure. 200.177.36.169 12:51, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The and hindi thing doesn't make sense 

message: Why is Latin listed while, for example, Icelandic (another official state language, but with more speakers) isn't?
:What, Latin isn't listed... 惑乱 分からん 15:04, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It was, briefly.  I removed it. john k 18:12, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I realized that later. Good done... 惑乱 分からん 20:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin 

message: Do we really have to use a separate table for Chinese & Hindi? It looks broken and confused me before I saw the note in the page source. Moskvax 01:16, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese & Hindi separate table 

message: WARNING, I removed a racist insult probably written by the racists of Italian Northern League under the voice "Zulu". You probably didn't understand: Italian racists use the world "zulu" in the meaning of savage or ignorant. Meaning this, the writer added that "zulu" was spoken in Sicily (which isn't) and included "other terronian lands". The word "terrone" is an insult based over the Italian word "terra" (land) given by racists of northern league to southerners of Italy, who were, in ancient times, mainly peasants. Nowadays, of course, southern Italy is more cultured and advanced of north, having a very higher rate of graduated then north.
PLEASE, identify the author of this racist insult.
Val
:It appears to have been written by someone with the IP address User:83.145.218.201 — who has made many other Italy-related edits that have been challenged.  (I would like to clarify this: the IP must come from Italy, but that does not mean it's the same person making all the edits.)  The "Zulu" edit was in fact made on 25 July 2006, so it has been there for some time.  Thank you for spotting it and being bold enough to remove it. ... discospinster talk 14:09, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: THERE ARE NO ZULUS IN SICILY

message: I didn't understand why portuguese is ranked 7th.
Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay, are different languages, can't be counted as one.
And Arabic are not mutually intelligible. I propose portuguese must be ranked as 5th, once we are counting native speakers only.
If Bahasa Indonesian and Bahasa Malay can be summed why not sum Portuguese with Spanish, they are completely mutually intelligible.
:This has needed cleaning up for a long time. I have the reverts in hand, but it may take a while to upload them. 
:A better comparison to Malay would be Portuguese and Galician. But we're going by popular conception here, not mutual intelligibility. kwami 14:17, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Portuguese and Spanish are not mutually intelligible. True, many native speakers of can communicate with many native speakers of the other, but it's usually through comprimising complete understanding. See Portuñol/Portunhol. —Morganfitzp 05:27, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Portuguese 

message: I understand that we are only by popular concept and not by mutual intelligibiliy. I just did  a comparison in the previous scrap.
Just to point out that Indonesian and Malay cannot be summed.
Another thing to point out is that Indonesian is just second language in Indonesia, coexisting wiht Javanese and many other distinct languages. And the people of East Timor do not speak Indonesia primarilly, in East Timor around 15% speaks Portuguese and the other 85% speaks Tetum.
Well as you said you already have the corrections in your hands, I hope we can see it posted in Wikipedia pretty soon. 
Thank You!!!
:Actually, if this list intends to sum Cantonese and Mandarin and Shanghaiese and every other Chinese dialect, then Malay and Indonesian must be summed also. Again, Indonesian and Malay are mutually intelligible, just further than British and American English. Native speakers of either Bahasa Indonesia or Bahasa Melayu have almost no difficulty understanding their counterparts in the opposite country. Try that with someone from Beijing and Hong Kong.--63.98.126.82 00:37, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  All right 

message: The article for Languages in the United States and the CIA world factbook linked below both state that 82% of the population of the United states (300 million as of 2006) speak english natively.  This gives a total of 246 million native speakers of english in the US alone.   if this ranking article is correct then the entire native english speaking population of the US (246 million) plus the united kingdom (60 million total population - minus about 25% of the total population of wales of 3 million or 0.75 million for 59.25 million english speakers) plus Canada (33 million population total 60% english for 20 million) plus Australia (20 million total 80% english for 16 million) gives a total of 341 million native english speakers allowing a population of only *negative* 33 million speakers in *all* other native english speaking populations in the world (308 million(article total) minus 341 million (english speaking total for US + UK + Canada + australia)).  How can there be such a large negative population of english speakers in all of the other countries?
Here are the links to pages that back up the populations and percentages given for:
The USA:  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
The United Kingdom:  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uk.html
Canada:  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ca.html
Australia:  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/as.html
using the language percentages and total populations from those links makes the 308 million native english speaker total simply impossible.
If no links can be shown to back up the 308 million total in a way that addresses the existing native speaker totals for *at least* those 4 countries (341 million) then I will change the article to the totals for those 4 countries rather than the absurd 308 million figure currently shown.  Granted my total of 341 million native speakers ignores millions of native english speakers in all other countries but it would still be a dramatic improvment over the existing figure.
:Besides the 25% of Wales that natively speaks Welsh, there are presumably a fairly large number of immigrants for whom Urdu or Chinese or Hindi or whatever is the native language, no?  Plus a minuscule number of native Gaelic speakers.  But it does seem as though the current number is low, especially given that there must be a fair number of native English speakers in New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, the West Indies, and scattered about elsewhere. john k 21:54, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Note, though, that the figures for the US, say, are presumably based on the 200 census, not the 2005 census estimate.  This creates problems, no? john k 09:53, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Your figure for the US seems too high, since the 82% figure is apparently based on the population aged 5 or more.(Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000) Why not simply use the numbers from List of countries by English-speaking population, rather than rely on these error-prone calculations based on percentages? I realise some of the figures are a bit outdated, but at least they have direct sources. The top ten countries there (ordered by number of native speakers) give a total of nearly 320 million native English speakers. -- Avenue 10:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quick calculation of the number of native english speakers 

message: I've disputed the acuracy of this article because it refers numerous times to a mysterious CIA document from 2004 without any further details. If someone knows what this document is, please cite the details correctly. If this document is the CIA world factbook, I'm not sure that we should use it; it is very unclear what they mean by counting someone as speaking a language. It is not at all obvious if they mean as his or her main daily language or first language or some type of fluency level or what. If we can't find a better source I think we should revert everything to the numbers from Ethnologue. It would be a shame to use so much 1984 data, though and it seems that the number of English speakers is something of a contetious issue. The Ethnologue puts this at 309 million (using data from various times between 1970 and 2004). I don't think people would stand for that, but there is little point in just guessing numbers out of thin air. I think that the Ethnologue is the most widely respected source and may be as accurate as we can get, but if people think it is out of date there is a vaguely accademic article from 2001 here comparing a number of sources. This may serve as a jumping off point to find a more satisfactory sum. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cwlq (talk • contribs) .
:I agree that the article is poorly cited, and that we should strive to improve this. I'm not so sure that Ethnologue is widely respected, and it's certainly not as accurate as we can get. Its figures are often very out of date (I've come across figures from 1960 in the English speakers section). Having said that, it is at least fairly comprehensive in its coverage. It could provide a reasonable starting point, but we shouldn't hesitate to use better sources where they exist. -- Avenue 23:38, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The Linguistic Society of America has a good summary of multilingualism at . If we incorporate some of that information into the introduction it may diffuse some controversy. This document from the LSA seems to suppost Ethnologue as the most reliable source . It may be the case that for many regions and languages up-to-date estimates are not availible and it is beyond the scope of this article to provide statistical projections for figures today. For instance, the paper "How Many People Use ASL in the United States? Why Estimates Need Updating" (Mitchell et al. Sign Language Studies 6.3 (2006) p306-335) notes that the last comprehensive survey of American Sign Languages users was done in 1974. The papers "Com    nce Differences between Native and Near-Native Speakers" (Coppieters  Language, Vol. 63, No. 3. (Sep., 1987), pp. 544-573.) and "Native Speaker Reaction to Non-Native Speech" (Schairer The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 76, No. 3. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 309-319.) supports the relevance of counting only native speakers. I strongly suggest that we revert all numbers to those given in the most recent edition of the Ethnologue and note in a consistant format the date that figure respresents. If more recent and reliable data exists, then we should certainly use that. However, I have not seen any other reliable sources. Chris Quackenbush 06:19, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is poorly cited 

message: Hungarian, Polish and German (not Yiddish) are all spoken in Israel, and i know some people who speak each of them. They are alive and well and not necessarily very old. There are daily newspapers in Hungarian and German and maybe Polish too. Ethnologue supports that.
I haven't met any Ukrainian speakers in Israel personally. All those who came to Israel from Ukraine spoke Russian. Ethnologue doesn't list Israel as a country where Ukrainian is spoken, however i am not erasing Israel from the list, because first of all, some children who learned Ukrainian in school in the 90's may prefer it to Russian and secondly, a local satellite TV provider started showing a Ukrainian channel lately. So maybe there is truth to that claim. --Amir E. Aharoni 07:23, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Languages in Israel 

message: If Spanish and Hindi have 390M and 370M native speakers respectively, why is Hindi above Spanish?  Similarly why is Bengali (171M) above Arabic (206M) and French (120M) above Japanese (127M), etc?  Lfh 14:22, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The count for Bengali (171 M) is definitely incorrect.  Bangladesh alone has a total population of 150 million+ (of which, almost 99% are native Bengali speakers). Add West Bengal, and Assam, you go past 220 million easily. --Ragib 23:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ordering 

message: Ifeldman84: I really don't know anyone personally anyone who speaks Ukrainian, but i didn't delete your edit - just marked it with . Most of the information in this article is based on Ethnologue and it doesn't say that anyone speaks Ukrainian in Israel. If you can prove that anyone does, you are welcome to send me your source for that.
* Spanish - i lived in a kibbutz full of Spanish speakers. Did you count Spanish speakers in Israel one by one and got to less than 1%? Even less than 1% is still significant and in Israel there are much more than 1%.
* Persian - there are clubs in Tel Aviv and Netanya that play Persian      . There's an Israli TV channel in Persian. There's a Kol Israel station in Persian. Moshe Katzav speaks Persian and has a radio program in Persian.
* Polish - my professor (ראש חוג) in the University speaks Polish and she's not old at all.
* As for Amharic - what language do all the Ethiopians speak?? Ukrainian maybe?
Please stop changing the article without any proof. --Amir E. Aharoni 05:14, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Languages in Israel again 

message: I think some sort of clarification of how this magical 480 million number is achieved. India has a population of about 1.1 billion. I'm unsure how many non-resident Hindi speakers speak Hindi as a first language especially beyond first generation. For example, Kenyans of Indian origin speak Hindi but their native language/first language tends to be Swahili especially beyond first generation of immigration. 
However, considering the populous non-Hindi-speaking Southern, Northern, Eastern and Western states in India, and the few Central states that partially speak Urdu (which I'm considering to be a distinct language as it is unintelligible to Hindi speakers in written or formal oral form), it astonishes me that still half of the country is supposed to be native Hindi speakers. Plus if one considers ethonologue report from 1998, Hindi was rated much lower in terms of population. Has Hindi population really doubled in 8 years? It's a little dubious. I smell a little bit of exaggeration for nationalistic reasons (as someone mentioned above) although I could be wrong of course :). Could someone shed some light on this?
Thanks you.
64.194.250.99 19:12, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: per the "number of speakers" entry on Hindi, it has "333 million" native speakers. Feel free to help cleanup by adding  to unsourced numbers. dab (ᛏ) 11:12, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

text: This has been discussed numerous times before. When you quote state populations, you cannot assume all the dwellers in a state speak the state language as a native language. UP has very Urdu-speaking communities, from what I understand. Same goes for Bihar. Mumbai, being in Maharashtra should have a larger native Marathi-speaking population, presumably. Hence, there's more to it than meets the eye. Also, when Hindi and Urdu are called different languages, there are many things that are considered - not just whether a guy from Karachi could get around in Delhi! There are scripts, language used in formal context (which is mutually unintelligible), commonly used words (days of the week, numbers) which are usually not different in dialects but are different across Hindi-Urdu. Anyway, most languages have these speculative numbers (based on state, country, province populations) because there seems to be a lack of data on native speakers. However, a push to reduce inflation would be useful. :) urnonav 16:46, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hindi speaker 

message: Can we make the numbers a little more concrete?  How about using this. - Peregrinefisher 17:56, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What people forget is that a lot of imigrant families speak their language from birth, even their children born in an English speaking speak another language when a child and learn english at school. Another thing in the Indiginous people of these countries like the Yolngu language, Maori language, or Anishinaabe language. Enlil Ninlil 08:53, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Number of English speakers

message: Should ASL be considered in the list? although not a traditional language it does have 20mil 'speakers'.
* Who are you ?  You didn't sign your name :) Palx 14:56, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  American Sign Language 

message: A great misleading shows that some trying to show that there are lot of English Speakers in world. It is very blunder. And misleading. Please correct It. English native speakers are very less. 
We can see English speaking people in Metro cities of India. But it is negligible when it compare to Hindi. It is same case of HongKong . Even world famous actor Jackie Chan don't know English well known.  
Selavaraj 09:23, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV

message: I imagine it is a negligible amount, but Navajo may be worth investigation to be added to the list of endangered languages.  Though the population of the American reservation is only 300,000, it IS an official language, and there has been a concerted effort on the part of the population to teach it to children and incorporate it in a primarily english speaking environment. just offering it for consideration. Nastynorth 10:20, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  navajo 

message: There's a problem with multiple sources here, and some people doing their own calculations. OK, I admit it, I've done that (with discussion) for Arabic, as the ethnologue figure did seem clearly too low. But for this list the same source should be used for all the languages. My question is, which one? The ethnologue is the most widely used language reference, so that would be the default, but not the only choice. CIA doesn't seem to always cover the issue consistently. The other lists don't seem to go lower than the top 13 or so, so could not be used for consistency. SO I'd propose using the ethnolgue figures, imperfect as they are. Or you could have differnet lists, according to XXX...
Your opinions please! --Drmaik 21:29, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Using Ethnologue does seem the most expedient method. However, I think that having a comparative list would be best in the long run. For example:
Number	Ethnologue                            	CIA                                   	etc.
1     	Chinese, Mandarinxy.z million speakers	Chinese, Mandarinxz.y million speakers	etc.
Obviously, that would need some work, but that would be the theory. Sectori 00:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  a proposal 

message: What about Indonesian language? How come it is not listed here? Though the external link says it is on ranking number 8 or 9? 84.44.224.140 15:11, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe that the issue with Indonesian is that it appears to be primarily spoken as a second language. As per the Wikipedia article: "The language is spoken fluently as a second language by most Indonesians, who generally use a regional language (examples are Minangkabau and Javanese) at home and in their local community." Note that Javanese is on the list, ranking 14th (although as has been pointed out repeatedly, the data seem flawed). Sectori 00:07, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Excuse me, I'm not an expert or anything, but isn't this list about the number of NATIVE speakers? If you speak a language since birth you ARE a native speaker, even if that isn't your first language, these are 2 very different things. XVoX 18:32, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

text:  Agreed. If you are going to count the North African and Middle Eastern French community as a native speaking group, then you must count most of the 222 million Indonesians as speakers of Bahasa Indonesia. Even more appropriately, it must be grouped in with the 18 million Malay speakers already mentioned. Malay and Indonesian are mutually intelligible; Cantonese and Mandarin are not, whereas they are still grouped as one language. In fact, Indonesian is almost entirely derived from Malay, with some added words from Dutch. If you are going to be consistent in this list, Indonesian/Malay would be the fifth most commonly spoken language, immediately ahead of Arabic. --63.98.126.82 00:28, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Indonesian 

message: What about eg Cantonese (71m+ speakers). This link gives a lot more detail: http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/may/SinoTibetanLanguageFamily.htm. Also, should Urdu (Pakistan) not be included in the Hindi section?
81.6.227.76 10:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese Langagues? 

message: I'm taking out Eritrea as a country where Italian is officially spoken because the country doesn't have any official language. English and Arabic(together with other local ones) are generally used as working languages there. In fact, Italian seems to be pretty much dead in Africa (it has just about disappeared from Somalia as well).Pedrassi 20:52, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Italian

message: What happened to arabic? Even if there are dialecs, it's still a real language. ZeroFive1 02:50, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, I've now noticed Pedrassi that you have been discussing it. But it looks like an edit war is evolving. In defining a language, what speakers feel themselves to be speaking seems to have a stronger influence that mutual intelligibility (which works in dialect chains anyway: I think everyone in the Arab world can understand their neigbours in the nearest town or village just fine), so my vote for this list is to keep Arabic as a language. But I won't revert as there hasn't been a full discussion. You're right, Pedrassi, about consistency, and as you suggest, Hindi does have the same issues, which is why ethnologue gives it 180m. But somewhere between 200-300m people feel themsleves to be speakers of Arabic, whether they can understand everyone else who thinks the same or not. I don't know about Chinese: do people first consider themeslves of Mandarin/Cantonese or Chinese: my hunch is gernally the former, but that's just a hunch from talking to a few Chinese people, nothing scientific. Drmaik 05:45, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

text: That is not right. Arabs understand each other even if they speak in their own dialects.--AraLink 02:38, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Someone must have vandalised the page and removed it; this is one of the most highly vandalised pages on Wikipedia. I seem to recall it being around fifth or so. I don't have the time right now to sift through old edits looking for where Arabic was taken out, but someone should. —Cuiviénen 01:34, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Probably it is an act of vandalism again. I've added it back. Can we request a simi-protection to a page? --AraLink 01:54, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Arabic

message: Who are you ? A Wikipedia administrator, certainly not !
Who gives you the right to erase our contributions ?  You are not owner of this subject! 
I am sorry but you cannot systematically reject our contributions ? 
Your comments are not convincing ! respect us and you will respect yourself !
Is it necessary to utilize an administrator...to stop your schemes ?
Busway 13:13, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Drmaik  Who are you 

message: Would it not be an idea to add the following, as Wikipedia states their official status in various countries:-
Bislama, Dhivehi, Dzongkha, Fijian, Frisian, Hiri Motu, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic, Latin, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Maori, New Zealand Sign Language, Romansh, Tetum, Venda and Welsh. All have less than a million speakers worldwide. Has anyone any thoughts? RAYMI —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 80.68.39.212 (talk) 12:46, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  new section comments 

message: I can not stop laughing at the figures shown on this page in context to india. Population of Uttar Pradesh (state in India) is
180 million. Hindi is native tongue of not only this stae but atleast 3 other indian states with additional atleast 150 million population. Here on this page the figure for hindi is quoted as 170 or something. Infact they have removed Hindi from list breaking it into different dialects. Thats fancy. What linguist in the worldd regards Khariboli, Awadhi, Benarsi as diffrent language. Is Chinese just one language? Even the link quoted as refrence gives correct figure arond 330 million. Shame on you people, try to depict the world on wikipedia as it is, not what you would like to be.
:I agree  that if Chinese is to be treated as a single language, the various  Hindi dialects should be treated as, well, dialects of Hindi. john k 16:25, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: To be fair, Hindi shouldn't be compared to Chinese, but instead to Mandarin. Linguists may divide Chinese and Indian languages, but I've never seen Mandarin or Hindi subdivided. Sergey R. 07:11, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Laughing at figures on hindi