Ugh double letters, more bad memories. I was working on gps navigation in the late 90's with maps for the whole of Europe. So I got to deal with all the extra characters of all European countries, making sure all the street names were sorted correctly and non native speakers could also find the right streets with phonetic matching. Frigging nightmare.

Š, Œ, Ž, š, œ, ž, Ÿ, À, Á, Â, Ã, Ä, Å, Æ, Ç, È, É, Ê, Ë, Ì, Í, Î, Ï, Ð, Ñ, Ò, Ó, Ô, Õ, Ö, Ø, Ù, Ú, Û, Ü, Ý, Þ, ß, à, á, â, ã, ä, å, æ, ç, è, é, ê, ë, ì, í, î, ï, ð, ñ, ò, ó, ô, õ, ö, ø, ù, ú, û, ü, ý, þ, ÿ

I've seen them all and special rules for some characters counting as 2 letters were fun too.
And then they switched to unicode to support even more languages. Russian cyrillic was fun too :/

Come to think of it, dutch has some devillish streetnames
Oudezijdsachterburgwal, Noordscharwouderpolderweg, Burgemeester Baron van Voerst van Lyndenstraat, Burgemeester Jonkheer Quarles van Uffordlaan.
(Fun making algorithms to match that to JQ Ufoodlane)

Doesn't hold a candle to the Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch though.
Yeah that caused some nasty buffer overflow errors.

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.

C#.  Though C++ depending on the platform and the purpose. 

I doubt that German is an especially poetic languages. At the time poetry was popular, one of the cultural central points was in germany. It's the same with your example: pop-songs are usually in english (that is not longer true if you look for classical songs). The biggest market at the moment speaks english. And it is unusual to synchronize music (like it is done in some countries with movies). But sometimes - 'House of Rising Sun' sung by Manfred Krug with german text is as good as the original.

I personally don't think German is an especially great language (and that as a german). You are right, german grammar is very hard, pronouncation is also difficult. As a programmer I like the highly logical Mandarin, I vote Chinese for this reason.

I know that the numbers vary a little in the actual value itself, however all across the board it seems to show that Russian and Japanese still make it top 10.  That was the main reason I posted that.

Hehe, we actually have a project, for that we try to find the right geographic point for a given address. As different people inputted these addresses we have to handle all sort of stuff in the address records. Luckily we aren't embedded, so we can use enough memory, so that buffer overflows don't happen with such short names as this welsh one.

English... the others don't make very much sense to me.

English because its the only language I can speak.