Bottom line, English is spoken in a lot of places, while Mandarin isn't.
This post is an adaptation of a comment I made on a discussion thread, "What is the most spoken language in the world?" BlogCatalog (started February 17, 2008). [NOTE: April 22, 2008. I found that the original BlogCatalog discussion thread has been purged from the database. thegoodknife, one of the people who makes BlogCatalog work, provided a Google cache URL of the thread. I've replaced the dead link with the Google cache, which should be around for at least a short while.]
There were quite a few answers suggested, including Mandarin and English.
Being what I am, I had to do a little (tiny) amount of research. The resource I found after a minute or two wasn't the most well-known, but had the virtue of citing sources: "The World's Most Widely Spoken Languages".
From that article, on the St. Ignatius High School, Columbus, OH, website, I summarized:
Top five languages, by native speakers
Summer Institute for Linguistics (1999):- Chinese (937,132,000)
- Spanish (332,000,000)
- English (322,000,000)
- Bengali (189,000,000)
- Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
- Mandarin Chinese (836 million)
- Hindi (333 million)
- Spanish (332 million)
- English (322 million)
- Bengali (189 million)
- Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion)
- English (330 million)
- Spanish (300 million)
- Hindi/Urdu (250 million)
- Arabic (200 million)
Top five languages, spoken as a secondary language
According to Weber:- French (190 million)
- English (150 million)
- Russian (125 million)
- Portuguese (28 million)
- Arabic (21 million)
Secondary and Primary Speaker Counts
Adding secondary speaker populations and primary speaker populations, top five:- Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion)
- English (480 million)
- Spanish (320 million)
- Russian (285 million)
- French (265 million)
- English (115)
- French (35)
- Arabic (24)
- Spanish (20)
Russian (16)
- Where the language has full legal or official status
- Where the language has some legal or official status and is an influential minority language, such as English in India or French in Algeria
- Fringe countries, "where the language has no legal status, but is an influential minority language in trade, tourism, and the preferred foreign language of the young, such as English in Japan or French in Romania".
- Number of primary speakers
- Number of secondary speakers
- Number and population of countries where used
- Number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige
Most Influential Languages
Here it is, Weber's most influential languages (number of Weber's points given in parentheses):- English (37)
- French (23)
- Spanish (20)
- Russian (16)
- Arabic (14)
- Chinese (13)
- German (12)
- Japanese (10)
- Portuguese (10)
2 comments:
These are very useful numbers. I'm interested to see that they count Hindi and Urdu as the same language as well.
I guess the amount of Chinese on the web will increase as China's young population goes online. There are already some very popular Chinese blogs, for instance Xu Jinglei's, which I read was the most widely read blog in the world at one point. I suppose one of the reasons it doesn't get more attention in the west is that we don't know how to read it!
PocketCultures,
Thanks for commenting. Combining Hindi and Urdu seemed odd to me. The last I knew, the were two rather distinct languages.
It will be interesting to watch the evolution of China online: This blog is already getting some hits from that country.
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