Of course the place in the rankings depends on how much the others grew as well. This list also differs from other rankings (and this is one of the reasons I found it interesting) in that it tries to count 1st and 2nd language speakers – many other rankings count only 1st language speakers, which I think has less practical relevance.

I’m not an expert to be able to say whether Azeri counts technically as the same language, even if it is perfectly mutually intelligible with Turkish (well, maybe apart from uçak duşuyor ☺) But you are right that there are at very least a few million speakers outside Turkey.

G’night

No matter where you are in the Arabic world, MSA can be easily understood and picked up regardless of dialect.

(and this is not even mentioning Quranic Arabic, which is not only understood by the 250+ million in the Arab world but nearly universally by the nearly 1 billion Muslims around the world!)

I agree with you that there are probably a lot of people who can use a given language for communication (without being fluent) who aren’t counted here, especially in English.

for instance, i dont know a whole lot of spanish, but mixing words around (with horrible grammar, i am sure) i can often get my point across. could i have a conversation about aristotle or some sports team in spanish?

i aslo think the level of english has probably raised quite a bit, with the internet. the majority of sites, games, movies etc are in english, and with china, india, japan, germany, france and im sure many others having english be a near-requirement in many schools and universities, a basic understanding of the language has probably gone up by at least 30% more than just the population growth.

there are NO italians in the list!!!!!

AAAAARRRRGGGGGGGGG

(the largest Arabic dialect) … Egyptian Arabic, with 46 million speakers, … ranks … no higher than 23rd. The different “dialects” of Arabic, of which there are over 25, offer quite solid barriers to mutual intelligibility, so they are well cast in this list as distinct languages. If they are consolidated as a single hyper-language community, united by the élite’s use of Classical Arabic as a lingua franca, they would amount to something over 205 million, placing them between Bengali and Portuguese.)

In general I gave short shrift to dialect differences in the book, even where they’re substantial. Culturally, no doubt, all these Arabic-speakers feel part of the same language community, and those communities were what I was writing about in the narrative sections of the book. So I could have tried to sum the Arab language community. But they are comparable in difference of intelligibility, I would suggest - contra Kase above, not to English but to Chinese dialects - and these are treated as separate languages in this statistical chapter. (My main source of data was the SIL Ethnologue - and SIL are notorious as ’splitters’ rather than ‘lumpers’ in their approach to languages.)