| MDMAlliance said: "1. Chinese (Mandarin) 1,213,000,000 2. Spanish 329,000,000 3. English 328,000,000 4. Arabic 221,000,000 5. Hindi 182,000,000 6. Bengali 181,000,000 7. Portuguese 178,000,000 8. Russian 144,000,000 9. Japanese 122,000,00010. German 90,000,000" Did a quick search and these numbers showed up. |
Hmm, the numbers for Mandarin seem too high and the numbers for English too low. I assume this are only native speakers, because people that learned the languages should be much more. Mandarin is only one of the languages in China. The different languages in China like Mandarin, Kantonese, Wu, Min, Jin, Xiang and Hakka are often all called Chinese, but native speakers in one of these languages can't understand the other. They all share the same writing system though. With 1,3 billion chinese people, nearly everyone was counted as a native speaker of Mandarin. That can't be true. My teacher for Mandarin for instance came from Shanghai and learned it in school. His native language is Wu (and other people from Suzhou said it's only a dialect of Wu). I somewhere read, there are 880 million native speakers of mandarine. German Wikipedia [1] says 867 million and the english wikipedia says 845 and 1.02 billion?
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordchinesische_Dialekte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(linguistics)
So lets say between 800 million and 1 billion. 1.2 billions seems way too high and probably counted "chinese" language, that includes the other chinese languages.
English on the other hand seems very low. I assume that nearly every inhabitant of the US, GB and Australia speaks english as a native tongue. That alone makes 397 million. In many african countries people speak english or french as native tongues (that also makes me curious, why french isn't in that top ten).
Hmm, that said, Wikipedia also counts native speakers of english not very high. Probably Mandarin is the clear winner, if counted the native speakers. Including people who speaks it as second language may be close for Mandarin and English.
