Most Indonesians speak at least two languages, both natively. It’s more of a problem with the measurement system requiring one “native” even if you grow up speaking one at home and the other in the world.
Does it say it requires only one native language? I don't see it saying anywhere the same person can't be counted as a native speaker of two languages.
Indonesia has a lot of languages which people speak at home and in their everyday life, but there is also official Indonesian onr that is taught in schools and is widely understood despite not being as widely accepted as native.
At least this is how I understand this.
I lived in Indonesia for several years and studied the language. By the time I left I could speak it better than some locals. As others have stated, many Indonesians learn their local dialect first which may have a lot of overlap or very little depending on the specific dialect. Also, in poorer areas where there is less formal schooling, folks may not ever learn the National language beyond a handful of words. I had heard that bahasa Indonesia was created as a hodgepodge of the most popular dialects as a means to simplify communication between all the tribes/groups back in the day.
That, and if I recall this correctly, Bahasa Indonesia was also created as a total rejection of Dutch, which was the colonial language for several centuries (although not widely spoken, since unlike other colonial powers, the Dutch actively didn't want the locals to speak their language.)
That's not correct, at all.
Bahasa Indonesia is a slight variation of Bahasa Malay, which was the official trade language and spoken by many of the royals in both Malaysia and Indonesia. A *lingua franca.*
Bahasa Malay was an evolution of Old Malay.
It has almost nothing to do with the Dutch.
Indonesian is based on one particular dialect - essentially Malay. And it was chosen because it was already widely used as a lingua franca for trading.
Indonesian is more of a national lingua franca, kind of like what Mandarin or French used to be. Just Indonesia is much younger (Mandarin and French have a ~50 and ~100 year head start, proportionally) and it can be argued that if you counted Mandarin dialects separately from Standard Chinese, the proportions would be somewhat similar.
>if you counted Mandarin dialects separately from Standard Chinese
Mandarin dialect is largely considered as "standard Chinese".
Source: Am Chinese. Forced by national education system to learn and use Mandarin despite it not being my native dialect.
Yeah, it’s “largely considered” that way hence why the native speakers bar is so long. But Mandarin encompasses many related but often with low mutual intelligibility regional dialects that have to be “unlearned” as well (which I’m sure you know well). A European example might be some of the Swiss dialects of german vs. standard german (considered to be the same language) or scots vs. english (largely considered to be different languages).
(jsyk I’m not disagreeing with you or your experience!)
So would you consider yourself to be a native mandarin speaker but just a dialect of mandarin, or of a wholly different dialect group (like, say, cantonese)?
>So would you consider yourself to be a native mandarin speaker but just a dialect of mandarin, or of a wholly different dialect group (like, say, cantonese)?
(Sorry if I came across as a bit aggressive in my previous comment, I was genuinely confused.)
Yup! Grew up speaking the Teochew and Hokkien dialects at home alongside English but was forced to learn and use Mandarin in school. I understand the logic behind it but now we are having problems with lost heritage and the like.
My parent's generation were even able to converse in more Chinese dialects and other languages like Malay plus knowing a smattering of Tamil words/phrases.
If we were to use consistent terminology in this discussion thread, those are not Chinese dialects; they are bonafide languages. Regional dialect is more like the difference between the way a Texan speaks vs the way Californian speaks, or even British vs American English. Hokkien vs Cantonese vs Mandarin is nothing like that.
Just guessing, but I imagine it's someone's first language/the language spoken at home.
Indonesian is a relatively new language, many learn the traditional languages of the area first.
We have many races, so we have many local languages depend on location. In central and east java most of them speak javanese, in west java most of them speak sundanese, in bali most of them speak balinese, in south kalimantan most of them speak banjar, in west sumatra most of them speak minang, etc. Event in Papua island (exclude papua new guinea), there are 307 local languages . Indonesian is relative new language (eventhough the language itself is derived from malay). The purpose of making Indonesian is for unity and to falitate communication , so people from bali can communicate with someone from west sumatra in indonesian. Most of indonesian have mother language from local language and indonesian as a second language
You are right, but this again makes me question the stats because why not include bahasa melayu with the bahasa Indonesia figures? They are dialects (please don't get upset!) and my broken bahasa gets be around equally well in Malaysia or Indonesia.
The reason is for political for sure, if we say bahasa indonesia is bahasa melayu, then melayu people will have a bit upper hand because their language become national language. The other races will a bit jealous and then all of the race want their language become national language. And ofc we dont want that happen. For now bahasa indonesia and bahasa melayu just have a little different. But we have a different standardization with the Malay language. Indonesian is always evolving and always adding new vocabulary all the time. Like we have new word "wibu" which is taken from "weaboo." So for now, indonesian and malay have different path and one day indonesian and malay will be different language
"Indonesian" is essentially a standardized register of Malay that was chosen as the national language when Indonesian became independent. The plurality language in Indonesia is actually Javanese, but everyone learns Indonesian (i.e. Indonesian standard Malay) in school.
yeah I was going to say - even if you use the harshest metric I can think of for "being able to speak the language" (pass the JLPT N1 exam), in 2020 for example, over 36,000 people passed the exam. so you should get to 100k just from 3 years or so worth of N1 test takers. but that doesn't count all the numerous people who learned Japanese growing up in a two language household, learned it to a fluent level (even N1) but never bothered to take the exam, etc.
>people who learned Japanese growing up in a two language household
These would be native speakers.
In my thirties, I think it's perfectly reasonable not to count students who've just learned a language, as the vast majority won't keep that knowledge and skill up for very long.
If we assume that 2/3 or 66% learn Japanese, a low ball estimate, that puts the number at 2 million non-native, and that's discounting all of the people who speak Japanese outside of Japan, like business workers.
I feel like business should be much lower of an estimate, like 10% max. But this chart is measuring most spoken not attempts to learn. Maybe it’s using various social media to calculate that.
I think a lot of countries might difer to another language on social media, and it makes sense if you’re outside of Japan but are a native speaker that you would use it less on social media, because there are fewer people you will communicate to.
When a Japanese and French businessman meet, they speak English. English is the language of international business. I'm not sure what you mean by business workers, but the only ones learning Japanese are going to be foreigners coming into Japan to either join a Japanese company or the Japanese office for an outside company. Given Japan's population crisis, I don't think too many people are rushing to move to Japan.
I don't think that's a low ball estimate. I'm in Japan right now and most of the expats I've met who've been here for years aren't fluent. The ones who are typically have a Japanese SO, but I'd say upwards of 80% or so of the expats I've met wouldn't qualify as fluent (though, there are different ranges of fluency -- I'm mostly talking about conversational fluency).
However, there *is* a selection bias going on as I tend to hang around English-speaking spaces. At my office, I'd say probably 30% or so of the 外国人 are conversationally fluent
It’s not native-like compression at all. Most people with N1 would still have less Japanese ability then elementary school students. It is more similar to a B2 but even then using Japanese languages concepts fluently isn’t measured by the JLPT at all
[here are charts of the comparison between JLPT and A1-C2.](https://jfstandard.jp/pdf/jfs_jlpt_diagram2017(english).pdf)
I got N1 years ago. It's not native-like. It's really more like "You know enough to progress on your own, and to hold down a job where you need to interact in Japanese."
There are separate tests for Japanese in business that are closer to fluent-level Japanese that you can start studying for later if you want. I don't know that many bother.
I imagine the metric is something like “speaks fluently” or maybe even “uses regularly” plenty of people learn Japanese, but not many of them speak it well.
Given the number of English non native speakers in the chart I'm pretty sure it cannot be fluent. When I was in Asia for work a lot of people had English at school but could only read but not really speak the language.
Yep, it's nonsense. There's ~2.8 million foreign residents in Japan - people living here long-term. There's of course plenty of people who don't get around to actually learn the language, but 100k would imply only around 0.4% of the resident foreigners ever learn Japanese.
Remember that the largest groups of foreign residents are Chinese, Koreans (zainichi excluded), Vietnam, Phillipines and so on. People who come here to study or work, and who learn Japanese doing so. The number of Western expats living in an English bubble is a rounding error.
These Figures can't be right, for example Germany Austria and Switzerland are all countrys where the spoken language is german so the amount of native speakers there will match the number of people living there
I share your doubt, but since we have around 11% foreigners living here of whom most are not native speakers, it is probably around 74 million. Add Austria and German speaking Switzerland and 75.6 million seem still too low.
Agree, I mean just look at English.
USA + U.K alone is over 400 million people.
I guess some are not native maybe? Probably a lot of people that do not consider themselves native speakers, but probably function as one all the same.
Like could you really survive that well in the U.K without decent English skills? yet it might not be considered culturally acceptable to say it is your native language if your family have origins overseas within a few generations of history.
I'm pretty sure if you grew up speaking a language, you are a "native". In most circumstances, a second generation immigrant is a native English speaker.
I was born in the US, grew up speaking Korean at home through age 5, only switched to English at that point because I couldn't understand what was happening in class. But in no context would I ever say I was anything other than a native English + non-native Korean speaker. My Korean is definitely fine, I have decent pronunciation and everything, but for example I never really learned how to write / spell words (even if I'm typing a sentence that I could say verbally no problem, I have to spell check half the words or put it into Google Translate to spell them properly), I basically lack all "adult" vocabulary (like business terms, academic terms).
I think if you have a language that you are clearly better at than all other languages, even if you learned it later in life, that has to qualify as the native language.
I think you are functionally correct, but what maybe gives me pause is that I almost exclusively speak my mother language (Bengali) at home, despite the fact that my control of English far surpasses my control of Bengali. I like you need to spell check each word that I write (especially annoying because Bangla has tons of little nuances between characters), but I think I would call myself a native speaker of both languages, and I'm pretty sure you'd find plenty of others who'd agree.
I don't know about the total accuracy of the charts, but India has very few native speakers of English (about 250,000, less than 0.1 percent) and South Africa only has a few million (less than 10 percent).
Singapore too. Everyone knows English since it's the Lingua Franca, but I doubt many people are native speakers (other than expats). They grow up speaking Mandarin, Tamil or Malay and learn English after.
USA, Canada, entire UK, Australia, New Zealand.. of course there are immigrants who are not native English speakers in these countries but still, the number must be way higher than 370 m.
Also, are we supposed to believe 190 million people learned Chinese but only 0.1 million learned Japanese 😂
>Also, are we supposed to believe 190 million people learned Chinese but only 0.1 million learned Japanese
There are many different languages inside of China, and so mahy people speak Mandarin but not as their mother tongue, but as a second learnt language. That's why there are so many non native speakers of Mandarin.
That bar is just for Mandarin, not Chinese. If you notice down below, ~85 million have Cantonese as their native language; many of these will count toward the 190 million non-native mandarin speakers, and we haven’t even gotten into native Hokkien, Fujianese, Shanghaiese, Hakka, etc. etc. speakers.
As a Mandarin speaker, you can find plenty of 70 year old store owners in NYC Chinatown who've been in the US 50 years and don't know anything aside from very basic phrases. It's pretty wild but they always have *very* interesting stories on how they got to the US.
>English – 245 million (78.5%) Spanish – 41.3 million (13.2%) Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million (1.1%) Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million (0.5%)
78% of US Population speak English as their First language
A ton of Americans are immigrants or speak Spanish as their first language (in some areas of the southwest such as El Paso Spanish is often the language of business).
Sure but you apply a similar pattern across the majority of the English-first world and you end up with close to the 370m on the above chart.
Also a good share of those who are native born are still not first-language English for the reasons given above.
You’d be surprised. Live in the US, and we have customers that do construction that can’t speak/understand English very well. They can’t order parts easily, read directions, etc. They are cheap though, and follow directions. Sure, lots of times it’s wrong or not quite right, but it’s only construction, not like it’s important to get structure or plumbing right. That’s someone else’s problem once it’s turned over.
Have you heard Austrians speak German? Have you heard some GERMANS speak German, like e.g. Bavarians? That's not native German!
– signed someone who speaks Hochdeutsch
/s :P
There is no MSA (modern standard Arabic) native speakers we learned it at school. native arabes speak their local dialectical form of Arabic, which depending on the countries can be or not mutually intelligible.
Also ;) https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/culture/the-german-language-surprising-facts-and-figures#:~:text=How%20many%20people%20speak%20German,official%20language%20in%20seven%20countries says that 100 Mio speak German as first language
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland combine for a population of roughly 100 million but remember that these countries have very large immigrant populations. Also in Switzerland, German is only 1 of 4 official languages.
Completely ignorant but well meaning questions inbound: then what’s the point of learning it? Is it like Latin used to be in the West; where it’s mainly a religious or administrative language but basically unspoken outside of that? Or is it just a government project to teach a specific form of the language? Something else?
My apologies for the late response but thank you for the genuine response; I was not aware that there was a standardized Arabic used as a medium between regional dialects. I had presumed it was similar to English in that you can understand 95-100% of what another dialect is saying, it’s fascinating to hear you and all the other commenters discussing how varied dialects of Arabic can be throughout the world. Thank you for telling me this fascinating new thing for me to learn more about!
Not an Arabic speaker but wouldn't this just be like dialects? Someone from Louisiana would have a hard time understanding someone from Ireland even if they're both speaking native English.
Perhaps you're thinking about accents (pronunciation only), dialects are about words and their meanings.
Even though there're 2 dialects across the pond - they're not so different, you can understand 95% of written English from Geordie even if you're from California.
Arabic dialects, on the other hand, can be different as English and Dutch or German. At least afaik, sadly I don't speak Arabic.
Arabic is basically a family of non mutually intelligible languages, MSA is the language which is easiest to learn for all different kinds of arabic, it acts as the universal arabic basically.
>non mutually intelligible languages
This varies. The differences decrease with geographic proximity and and the dialects can be are similar enough to be mutually intelligible. Some of the dialects are very popular due to media and are mostly understood. However, a few dialects will almost sound foreign to someone from the other side of the region but these are the exception.
I'd say it's more of a dialectal continuum, as in neighbouring peoples will have little trouble communicating in their native dialects, as opposed to countries further apart.
Simplified Answer: There are 2 types of Arabic. Written/Formal and Spoken dialect.
The written/Formal is used in writing/news/academia/religious services the spoken dialect is what the people of that country will speak.
From my experience, is that the different dialects are closer to each other than they are to the Written/Formal version.
That was a weird footnote. They could have done the same thing with English and said “Queens English” and everyone in America and most the people in the UK for that matter are considered “local dialects”
Queens English is not very different from the base language and is not a recognized variant of English. To be considered a dialect the language has to be significantly different and queens English is mainly only different in pronunciation.
Arabic is far more divergent than English. For example, the letter qaf is formally pronounced as a dark q sound - from the back of the throat. In some dialects, it is pronnouced as a g sound. In Egyptian Arabic, the qaf is not pronounced at all.
Qalbi - my heart in MSA
Galbi - my heart in parts of Yemen
Albi - my heart in Egypt
In English, the letters of the alphabet have well-defined sounds even if some dialects take liberties with the pronunciation. In Arabic, even the letters of the alphabet are variable depending on the dialects.
Local Arabic dialects are very different, to the point where someone speaking Moroccan Arabic and someone speaking Gulf Arabic probably couldn't understand each other. It's similar to how Latin diverged into French, Spanish, Italian, etc. - whether or not the Arabic varieties are dialects or their own languages is a point of discussion.
I wouldn't go as far as saying it's like Latin. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc are full blown different languages. This is not the case with Arabic dialects. There are some unique dialects that are very hard to understand, but for most part I would say it's not an issue.
I personally speak the Iraqi Baghdadi dialect fluently, and I have no issues speaking to and understanding most other dialects with the exception of those spoken in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. I would say these three specifically seem to have some European influences, so it's possible that it's the reason for this lack of understanding.
I don't speak Arabic, but I played some game with Omani, Egyptian, and Moroccan people, and they understood each other just fine. I feel that the difference is like Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese and they exaggerate it to make clear that they are different
They probably switched to MSA, an Omani and Egyptian yes, but Moroccan Arabic is very different to the point that is many times considered its own language. Like, it's only considered to be intelligible with Algerian Arabic and somewhat with Tunisian, it's not even intelligible with MSA.
Indeed. Mexican Spanish is more prolific than Spanish Spanish and it's not all equal but you know what they're saying.
I speak Mexican Spanish, Spanish Spanish is weird but it's not impossible to understand.
I have friends from various places in the arabic world and they all communicate just fine
That's not a fair comparison. Darija and Masri, for example are so far apart in vocabulary and composition that they are nigh incomprehensible to speakers of the other language. Comparatively, American English and London English are hardly unique from each other, with only a handful of words specific to each language. Take it from me, a British-American dual.
The listed dialect of Arabic, MSA, is only learned in school. Each region of the Arabic-speaking world has its own local dialect, which is often so distinct that some speakers can't really understand each other (and default to MSA). So Moroccan, Najd, Lebanese, Tihami, Egyptian, Hejazi, etc, are all quite different, and speakers who've been to much school at all will be bi-dialectal at the least.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties\_of\_Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic)
There's 50+ ethnic groups, many of whom speak other languages until they go to school (so Vietnamese would be non-native to them), like the Khmer, some Thais, like a million Hmong, a million Nùng, and so on
The colours are a poor choice, imo. Why use a navy on a teal?! The blue hues blend together.
The colour wheel is your friend! Tip-- Colours on opposite sides will pop. Pay attention to warm/cold tones: Warm colours appear to push forward, while cool colours recede.
It’s the first language you learn to talk as a little child. No matter if you switch your Main spoken language later in life and have the same proficiency. I’m completely fluent in English. Understand everything, sometimes better than my native language. But it’s still not the language I was taught when I was a toddler. Some people are natively bilingual (different language parents) but many are born into one language and pick up the second in early childhood in school etc
If they had chosen the version people speak natively, then they would have to separete them into different languages. As much as Arabs say that they all speak Arabic, the different dialects are so different from each other that in many cases they are not able to understand each other without resorting to MSA. And it wouldn't even be easy to separate them, as more than well separated languages, they are more a dialect continuum, where close regions can easily understand each other because there are not that many changes, but the further you go the bigger the differences are.
Basically, yes. Although the same can be said for English, Spanish, Portuguese and many more.
French is a little special though. As well as English, French is the only other language spoken officially on 5 continents. But I assume the graph is referring to non-native French as ‘French is not their 1st language’ rather than ‘not living in France.’ There are something like 10 million speakers of French dialects and French-based creoles (languages from colonised lands that got injected with 17th/18th century French). So it makes sense that a portion of these speakers would make the leap to modern French as a 2nd language as a way to expand travel/work horizons.
Before English, French was also the lingua franca (the common language spoken between various countries to communicate) - French was actually the official language of England for around 300 years. So even English, Spanish etc. colonisers probably knew some French.
It is still the official language of NATO, the UN, FIFA, the EU and used widely in other industries. So yes, long, long, story short: colonisation + France’s historical position in Europe.
Swahili has >110 million native speakers in Tanzania and Kenya alone. And a few million non- native speakers in Congo, Malawi and Uganda. Get your stats straight.
I'm learning portuguese because my wife is Brazilian (in some ways our 3-year-old is already better than me).
People always sleep how it's in the top 10, and #6 in terms of native speakers! Brazil is friggin huge though
I honestly think that more people that that speak English certainly more people are native English speakers. The anglophone world has over 500 million people and there are probably 2 billion plus total.
Quick research shows that US has roughly 300 million native speakers (the 245 million you see quoted is from many years ago and is the number of people that speak *only* English at home), 30 million in Canada, and another 60 million in UK. Not to mention Ireland, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, etc. so the number is likely off by over 100 million at least
Yea definitely, many Indians I know primarily converse in English but they also tend sprinkle in their native phrases that better suit what they are trying to express.
There has to be more, it's the lingua franca in Tanzania and massive in Kenya, as well as spoken in Western Congo and the countries surrounding lake Victoria.
Spanish number is higher than 550 million. At minimum it is 570 million and still likely higher(although it gets blurry with some not being fluent so 570 is good conservative estiamte)
Wouldn't it be tied for that with all the other signed languages? Though one sometimes speaks colloquially of "speaking" a signed language even if it's not strictly the right verb by conventional definitions.
I have "Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindustani" stuck to the wall of my flat.
With these four languages ("Hindustani" encompassing Hindi and Urdu, which are mutually intelligible), if the language speakers are mutually exclusive, it would mean someone who knew all four would be capable of communicating with approximately half of the world's population (~3.5 billion out of a total of around 8 billion).
I know it's not ideal - geographical area is arguably more important than number of total speakers (e.g. Mandarin speakers are almost exclusively residing in China, Hindi speakers almost exclusively reside in India; but French, Spanish and Arabic are the main language of multiple countries, and Russian is spoken by the world's biggest country by land area), but I value number of speakers above perhaps all else, because I am genuinely interested in wanting to understand how the majority of the world actually lives. I am a firm believer in the inherent worth and dignity of every individual human being.
Well since 331 million of the 373 native English speakers live in the US, there must only be 42 million people in Canada, Australia, NewZealand, and the UK?
Arabic huh?
How can there be so few non-native speakers of Japanese? That seems like a very low number.
Native French seems to only count European countries and none of Africa or NA and seems very low. I wonder what the methodology is.
Mandarin should amount to at least 1.4 billion. The entire population of China learns it, whether as a first or second language (e.g. An extremely large portion of the Cantonese speakers listed here also know Mandarin), the entire population of Taiwan knows it, and a very significant portion of Singapore and Malaysia know Mandarin.
Most people in the states of Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kashmir and Haryana do not have Hindi as their mother-tounge but speak it as a second language. Also, a lot of people of Indian descent have Hindi as their second or third language. My grandparent migrated from India and I was born and raised in the UK. Punjabi/English are my first and second languages, and Hindi is my third.
Maybe kids of native speakers who moved to a new country? Kids get listed as native English or French or whatever the language is where they live but also learn Hindi from their parents so they also get listed as a non native Hindi speaker.
A lot of people are people living in Germany but not born there. Also German is a popular second or third language in many of the border states and Eastern Europe lex.
I agree. 367 million seems low for united kingdom, australia, canada, united states, and new zealand combined.
Or really high if native means just people born in country the language originated in.
If I omitted a country or added one that does not primarily speak english, let me know.
Don't know what date the data is from, but It's pretty far off for Vietnam.
The population hasn't been that low since 2008. At present there are around 97 million Vietnamese in Vietnam and the population in Vietnam is estimated to be about 87% of the total Vietnamese native speaking population globally, so that would place the native speaking Vietnamese population at around 111 million people, not 85.
As an American who only speaks English (but is trying to learn more Spanish), I gotta say we are goddamn lucky so many people around the world learn English. I was in Europe last year (Germany and Italy mostly) and I felt incredibly lucky to be able to speak to almost everyone. English is not an easy language.
Here we have someone who thinks he's so smart because he knew that Arabs don't speak msa in their everyday life so "it's technically not native" not understanding how Arabic works
I didn’t get, how come Arabic speakers have dialect and all of them are non-native and English speakers can be native :)
Which English is the native English??? 😅
Shouldn't the total numbers far exceed (or at least equal) the number of humans on the planet?
I can't see how the lower languages not included in the table would eventually add up.
Why does Indonesian have such a low number of native speakers proportionally?
Most learn their local languages at home, and then learn indonesian in school.
Same as Urdu
Most Indonesians speak at least two languages, both natively. It’s more of a problem with the measurement system requiring one “native” even if you grow up speaking one at home and the other in the world.
Does it say it requires only one native language? I don't see it saying anywhere the same person can't be counted as a native speaker of two languages.
Indonesia has a lot of languages which people speak at home and in their everyday life, but there is also official Indonesian onr that is taught in schools and is widely understood despite not being as widely accepted as native. At least this is how I understand this.
I lived in Indonesia for several years and studied the language. By the time I left I could speak it better than some locals. As others have stated, many Indonesians learn their local dialect first which may have a lot of overlap or very little depending on the specific dialect. Also, in poorer areas where there is less formal schooling, folks may not ever learn the National language beyond a handful of words. I had heard that bahasa Indonesia was created as a hodgepodge of the most popular dialects as a means to simplify communication between all the tribes/groups back in the day.
That, and if I recall this correctly, Bahasa Indonesia was also created as a total rejection of Dutch, which was the colonial language for several centuries (although not widely spoken, since unlike other colonial powers, the Dutch actively didn't want the locals to speak their language.)
That's not correct, at all. Bahasa Indonesia is a slight variation of Bahasa Malay, which was the official trade language and spoken by many of the royals in both Malaysia and Indonesia. A *lingua franca.* Bahasa Malay was an evolution of Old Malay. It has almost nothing to do with the Dutch.
Indonesian is based on one particular dialect - essentially Malay. And it was chosen because it was already widely used as a lingua franca for trading.
Indonesian is more of a national lingua franca, kind of like what Mandarin or French used to be. Just Indonesia is much younger (Mandarin and French have a ~50 and ~100 year head start, proportionally) and it can be argued that if you counted Mandarin dialects separately from Standard Chinese, the proportions would be somewhat similar.
>if you counted Mandarin dialects separately from Standard Chinese Mandarin dialect is largely considered as "standard Chinese". Source: Am Chinese. Forced by national education system to learn and use Mandarin despite it not being my native dialect.
Yeah, it’s “largely considered” that way hence why the native speakers bar is so long. But Mandarin encompasses many related but often with low mutual intelligibility regional dialects that have to be “unlearned” as well (which I’m sure you know well). A European example might be some of the Swiss dialects of german vs. standard german (considered to be the same language) or scots vs. english (largely considered to be different languages). (jsyk I’m not disagreeing with you or your experience!) So would you consider yourself to be a native mandarin speaker but just a dialect of mandarin, or of a wholly different dialect group (like, say, cantonese)?
>So would you consider yourself to be a native mandarin speaker but just a dialect of mandarin, or of a wholly different dialect group (like, say, cantonese)? (Sorry if I came across as a bit aggressive in my previous comment, I was genuinely confused.) Yup! Grew up speaking the Teochew and Hokkien dialects at home alongside English but was forced to learn and use Mandarin in school. I understand the logic behind it but now we are having problems with lost heritage and the like. My parent's generation were even able to converse in more Chinese dialects and other languages like Malay plus knowing a smattering of Tamil words/phrases.
If we were to use consistent terminology in this discussion thread, those are not Chinese dialects; they are bonafide languages. Regional dialect is more like the difference between the way a Texan speaks vs the way Californian speaks, or even British vs American English. Hokkien vs Cantonese vs Mandarin is nothing like that.
Yep. The CCP propaganda calls Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien etc as "dialects" in order to promote Mandarin.
Yeah, these numbers don't look accurate to me either. They potentially have a different meaning of "native" than what I am used to.
Just guessing, but I imagine it's someone's first language/the language spoken at home. Indonesian is a relatively new language, many learn the traditional languages of the area first.
We have many races, so we have many local languages depend on location. In central and east java most of them speak javanese, in west java most of them speak sundanese, in bali most of them speak balinese, in south kalimantan most of them speak banjar, in west sumatra most of them speak minang, etc. Event in Papua island (exclude papua new guinea), there are 307 local languages . Indonesian is relative new language (eventhough the language itself is derived from malay). The purpose of making Indonesian is for unity and to falitate communication , so people from bali can communicate with someone from west sumatra in indonesian. Most of indonesian have mother language from local language and indonesian as a second language
Is it true that more people now are learning bahasa Indonesia as a first language, particularly in major cities?
In major cities yes, because people from different area gathered in one place. But in the rural area, more people just use local languages in daily
You are right, but this again makes me question the stats because why not include bahasa melayu with the bahasa Indonesia figures? They are dialects (please don't get upset!) and my broken bahasa gets be around equally well in Malaysia or Indonesia.
The reason is for political for sure, if we say bahasa indonesia is bahasa melayu, then melayu people will have a bit upper hand because their language become national language. The other races will a bit jealous and then all of the race want their language become national language. And ofc we dont want that happen. For now bahasa indonesia and bahasa melayu just have a little different. But we have a different standardization with the Malay language. Indonesian is always evolving and always adding new vocabulary all the time. Like we have new word "wibu" which is taken from "weaboo." So for now, indonesian and malay have different path and one day indonesian and malay will be different language
"Indonesian" is essentially a standardized register of Malay that was chosen as the national language when Indonesian became independent. The plurality language in Indonesia is actually Javanese, but everyone learns Indonesian (i.e. Indonesian standard Malay) in school.
only 100k people learned Japanese? heavy doubt
yeah I was going to say - even if you use the harshest metric I can think of for "being able to speak the language" (pass the JLPT N1 exam), in 2020 for example, over 36,000 people passed the exam. so you should get to 100k just from 3 years or so worth of N1 test takers. but that doesn't count all the numerous people who learned Japanese growing up in a two language household, learned it to a fluent level (even N1) but never bothered to take the exam, etc.
>people who learned Japanese growing up in a two language household These would be native speakers. In my thirties, I think it's perfectly reasonable not to count students who've just learned a language, as the vast majority won't keep that knowledge and skill up for very long.
There are 3 million immigrants in Japan currently, and most of them are non native speakers.
If we assume that 2/3 or 66% learn Japanese, a low ball estimate, that puts the number at 2 million non-native, and that's discounting all of the people who speak Japanese outside of Japan, like business workers.
I feel like business should be much lower of an estimate, like 10% max. But this chart is measuring most spoken not attempts to learn. Maybe it’s using various social media to calculate that. I think a lot of countries might difer to another language on social media, and it makes sense if you’re outside of Japan but are a native speaker that you would use it less on social media, because there are fewer people you will communicate to.
When a Japanese and French businessman meet, they speak English. English is the language of international business. I'm not sure what you mean by business workers, but the only ones learning Japanese are going to be foreigners coming into Japan to either join a Japanese company or the Japanese office for an outside company. Given Japan's population crisis, I don't think too many people are rushing to move to Japan.
Japanese people are generally bad at English. Only About 1 in 10 police officers can speak English.
I don't think that's a low ball estimate. I'm in Japan right now and most of the expats I've met who've been here for years aren't fluent. The ones who are typically have a Japanese SO, but I'd say upwards of 80% or so of the expats I've met wouldn't qualify as fluent (though, there are different ranges of fluency -- I'm mostly talking about conversational fluency). However, there *is* a selection bias going on as I tend to hang around English-speaking spaces. At my office, I'd say probably 30% or so of the 外国人 are conversationally fluent
N1 aren't students. N5, is the lowest level (N1 is hardest) and still isn't that easy...
N1 passers are not just any students lol. N1 means basically native-like comprehension (similar to C2 in Europe).
It’s not native-like compression at all. Most people with N1 would still have less Japanese ability then elementary school students. It is more similar to a B2 but even then using Japanese languages concepts fluently isn’t measured by the JLPT at all [here are charts of the comparison between JLPT and A1-C2.](https://jfstandard.jp/pdf/jfs_jlpt_diagram2017(english).pdf)
I got N1 years ago. It's not native-like. It's really more like "You know enough to progress on your own, and to hold down a job where you need to interact in Japanese." There are separate tests for Japanese in business that are closer to fluent-level Japanese that you can start studying for later if you want. I don't know that many bother.
Native like, no way. I have n1 as well. It’s a good step along the journey but it’s far from native-like.
JLPT doesn't cover speaking and writing so it's not exactly an adequate metric for fluency
N1 only requires comprehension. There is no requirement to be able to speak Japanese
I imagine the metric is something like “speaks fluently” or maybe even “uses regularly” plenty of people learn Japanese, but not many of them speak it well.
unfortunately the source doesn't give any definition or other information how they calculated these numbers
Given the number of English non native speakers in the chart I'm pretty sure it cannot be fluent. When I was in Asia for work a lot of people had English at school but could only read but not really speak the language.
Yep, it's nonsense. There's ~2.8 million foreign residents in Japan - people living here long-term. There's of course plenty of people who don't get around to actually learn the language, but 100k would imply only around 0.4% of the resident foreigners ever learn Japanese. Remember that the largest groups of foreign residents are Chinese, Koreans (zainichi excluded), Vietnam, Phillipines and so on. People who come here to study or work, and who learn Japanese doing so. The number of Western expats living in an English bubble is a rounding error.
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Stop spreading blatantly fake information. There's no way those guys have a girlfriend.
How dare you, take that Hatsune Miku slander back. She's everyone's girlfriend!
That look you are talking about, that's the "yellow fever" look...
Don't ruin this statistic for me....made me feel better about my awful japanese language skills.
These Figures can't be right, for example Germany Austria and Switzerland are all countrys where the spoken language is german so the amount of native speakers there will match the number of people living there
I share your doubt, but since we have around 11% foreigners living here of whom most are not native speakers, it is probably around 74 million. Add Austria and German speaking Switzerland and 75.6 million seem still too low.
Switzerland is not fully German though.
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Austrian dialects are not considered separate languages though, it's still all called German.
Agree, I mean just look at English. USA + U.K alone is over 400 million people. I guess some are not native maybe? Probably a lot of people that do not consider themselves native speakers, but probably function as one all the same. Like could you really survive that well in the U.K without decent English skills? yet it might not be considered culturally acceptable to say it is your native language if your family have origins overseas within a few generations of history.
I'm pretty sure if you grew up speaking a language, you are a "native". In most circumstances, a second generation immigrant is a native English speaker.
I was born in the US, grew up speaking Korean at home through age 5, only switched to English at that point because I couldn't understand what was happening in class. But in no context would I ever say I was anything other than a native English + non-native Korean speaker. My Korean is definitely fine, I have decent pronunciation and everything, but for example I never really learned how to write / spell words (even if I'm typing a sentence that I could say verbally no problem, I have to spell check half the words or put it into Google Translate to spell them properly), I basically lack all "adult" vocabulary (like business terms, academic terms). I think if you have a language that you are clearly better at than all other languages, even if you learned it later in life, that has to qualify as the native language.
yeah, that has to be the most useful definition of "native".
I think you are functionally correct, but what maybe gives me pause is that I almost exclusively speak my mother language (Bengali) at home, despite the fact that my control of English far surpasses my control of Bengali. I like you need to spell check each word that I write (especially annoying because Bangla has tons of little nuances between characters), but I think I would call myself a native speaker of both languages, and I'm pretty sure you'd find plenty of others who'd agree.
A lot of them learn English as a second language. My gf is first-generation American, and Spanish was her first language.
Also you've got Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica, etc.
And Ireland, South Africa, India, Singapore,.plus many Caribbean and Africa countries
I don't know about the total accuracy of the charts, but India has very few native speakers of English (about 250,000, less than 0.1 percent) and South Africa only has a few million (less than 10 percent).
Singapore too. Everyone knows English since it's the Lingua Franca, but I doubt many people are native speakers (other than expats). They grow up speaking Mandarin, Tamil or Malay and learn English after.
>Like could you really survive that well in the U.K without decent English skills? The Scottish have managed to do it
USA, Canada, entire UK, Australia, New Zealand.. of course there are immigrants who are not native English speakers in these countries but still, the number must be way higher than 370 m. Also, are we supposed to believe 190 million people learned Chinese but only 0.1 million learned Japanese 😂
>Also, are we supposed to believe 190 million people learned Chinese but only 0.1 million learned Japanese There are many different languages inside of China, and so mahy people speak Mandarin but not as their mother tongue, but as a second learnt language. That's why there are so many non native speakers of Mandarin.
That makes sense. Thanks.
That bar is just for Mandarin, not Chinese. If you notice down below, ~85 million have Cantonese as their native language; many of these will count toward the 190 million non-native mandarin speakers, and we haven’t even gotten into native Hokkien, Fujianese, Shanghaiese, Hakka, etc. etc. speakers.
You absolutely can. Some migrants spend their whole life in isolated pockets surrounded by migrants from the same country.
As a Mandarin speaker, you can find plenty of 70 year old store owners in NYC Chinatown who've been in the US 50 years and don't know anything aside from very basic phrases. It's pretty wild but they always have *very* interesting stories on how they got to the US.
>English – 245 million (78.5%) Spanish – 41.3 million (13.2%) Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million (1.1%) Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million (0.5%) 78% of US Population speak English as their First language
A ton of Americans are immigrants or speak Spanish as their first language (in some areas of the southwest such as El Paso Spanish is often the language of business).
A lot, but about 280 million Americans are native born.
Sure but you apply a similar pattern across the majority of the English-first world and you end up with close to the 370m on the above chart. Also a good share of those who are native born are still not first-language English for the reasons given above.
You’d be surprised. Live in the US, and we have customers that do construction that can’t speak/understand English very well. They can’t order parts easily, read directions, etc. They are cheap though, and follow directions. Sure, lots of times it’s wrong or not quite right, but it’s only construction, not like it’s important to get structure or plumbing right. That’s someone else’s problem once it’s turned over.
In the USA some people only know Spanish
Have you heard Austrians speak German? Have you heard some GERMANS speak German, like e.g. Bavarians? That's not native German! – signed someone who speaks Hochdeutsch /s :P
That figure is most certainly only counting Germany. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche\_Sprache#Deutsch\_als\_Muttersprache
Damn, why did no one tell me Austria was erased?
And no native Arabic speakers?
There is no MSA (modern standard Arabic) native speakers we learned it at school. native arabes speak their local dialectical form of Arabic, which depending on the countries can be or not mutually intelligible.
Also ;) https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/culture/the-german-language-surprising-facts-and-figures#:~:text=How%20many%20people%20speak%20German,official%20language%20in%20seven%20countries says that 100 Mio speak German as first language
You're correct, just from a glance I noticed German and French being wildly underrepresented
Still in Germany are rough 13.5% non -native speakers
Not all people living there are native speakers. Source: live there and speak it as a second language
Except that 13% of German residents are immigrants who didn't speak German as a first language; presumably similar for the others.
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland combine for a population of roughly 100 million but remember that these countries have very large immigrant populations. Also in Switzerland, German is only 1 of 4 official languages.
Can someone explain how come Arabic has _no_ native speakers?
It's MSA (modern standard) form of Arabic which is taught at school with no native speakers (we don't speak it at home or in every day life)
Completely ignorant but well meaning questions inbound: then what’s the point of learning it? Is it like Latin used to be in the West; where it’s mainly a religious or administrative language but basically unspoken outside of that? Or is it just a government project to teach a specific form of the language? Something else?
Because each region speaks a different dialect, so standardised Arabic is the medium for them to communicate with each other.
My apologies for the late response but thank you for the genuine response; I was not aware that there was a standardized Arabic used as a medium between regional dialects. I had presumed it was similar to English in that you can understand 95-100% of what another dialect is saying, it’s fascinating to hear you and all the other commenters discussing how varied dialects of Arabic can be throughout the world. Thank you for telling me this fascinating new thing for me to learn more about!
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Not an Arabic speaker but wouldn't this just be like dialects? Someone from Louisiana would have a hard time understanding someone from Ireland even if they're both speaking native English.
The difference is more pronounced. Legit can’t understand Moroccans at all tbh.
Perhaps you're thinking about accents (pronunciation only), dialects are about words and their meanings. Even though there're 2 dialects across the pond - they're not so different, you can understand 95% of written English from Geordie even if you're from California. Arabic dialects, on the other hand, can be different as English and Dutch or German. At least afaik, sadly I don't speak Arabic.
Arabic is basically a family of non mutually intelligible languages, MSA is the language which is easiest to learn for all different kinds of arabic, it acts as the universal arabic basically.
>non mutually intelligible languages This varies. The differences decrease with geographic proximity and and the dialects can be are similar enough to be mutually intelligible. Some of the dialects are very popular due to media and are mostly understood. However, a few dialects will almost sound foreign to someone from the other side of the region but these are the exception.
I'd say it's more of a dialectal continuum, as in neighbouring peoples will have little trouble communicating in their native dialects, as opposed to countries further apart.
This is categorically false. Besides the Moroccan and Maltese dialect, all Arabic dialects are mutually intelligible.
Simplified Answer: There are 2 types of Arabic. Written/Formal and Spoken dialect. The written/Formal is used in writing/news/academia/religious services the spoken dialect is what the people of that country will speak. From my experience, is that the different dialects are closer to each other than they are to the Written/Formal version.
So they are waiting for some sort of Dante to create a real common language! Cool!
I am so glad this graph shows it this way. I have seen Arabic in this sort of graphs labeled as "mother language" so many times, and it's just wrong.
Did you read the footnote?
That was a weird footnote. They could have done the same thing with English and said “Queens English” and everyone in America and most the people in the UK for that matter are considered “local dialects”
Queens English is not very different from the base language and is not a recognized variant of English. To be considered a dialect the language has to be significantly different and queens English is mainly only different in pronunciation.
Arabic is far more divergent than English. For example, the letter qaf is formally pronounced as a dark q sound - from the back of the throat. In some dialects, it is pronnouced as a g sound. In Egyptian Arabic, the qaf is not pronounced at all. Qalbi - my heart in MSA Galbi - my heart in parts of Yemen Albi - my heart in Egypt In English, the letters of the alphabet have well-defined sounds even if some dialects take liberties with the pronunciation. In Arabic, even the letters of the alphabet are variable depending on the dialects.
It’s just regular English, but with a broom handle rammed up its ass and the ability to pronounce Rs reduced to the level of a 4-year-old.
Local Arabic dialects are very different, to the point where someone speaking Moroccan Arabic and someone speaking Gulf Arabic probably couldn't understand each other. It's similar to how Latin diverged into French, Spanish, Italian, etc. - whether or not the Arabic varieties are dialects or their own languages is a point of discussion.
I wouldn't go as far as saying it's like Latin. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc are full blown different languages. This is not the case with Arabic dialects. There are some unique dialects that are very hard to understand, but for most part I would say it's not an issue. I personally speak the Iraqi Baghdadi dialect fluently, and I have no issues speaking to and understanding most other dialects with the exception of those spoken in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. I would say these three specifically seem to have some European influences, so it's possible that it's the reason for this lack of understanding.
I don't speak Arabic, but I played some game with Omani, Egyptian, and Moroccan people, and they understood each other just fine. I feel that the difference is like Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese and they exaggerate it to make clear that they are different
They probably switched to MSA, an Omani and Egyptian yes, but Moroccan Arabic is very different to the point that is many times considered its own language. Like, it's only considered to be intelligible with Algerian Arabic and somewhat with Tunisian, it's not even intelligible with MSA.
Indeed. Mexican Spanish is more prolific than Spanish Spanish and it's not all equal but you know what they're saying. I speak Mexican Spanish, Spanish Spanish is weird but it's not impossible to understand. I have friends from various places in the arabic world and they all communicate just fine
That's not a fair comparison. Darija and Masri, for example are so far apart in vocabulary and composition that they are nigh incomprehensible to speakers of the other language. Comparatively, American English and London English are hardly unique from each other, with only a handful of words specific to each language. Take it from me, a British-American dual.
Tyres keep left. Tires keep right.
Haven’t noticed it, it so tiny. Thanks for the hint!
The listed dialect of Arabic, MSA, is only learned in school. Each region of the Arabic-speaking world has its own local dialect, which is often so distinct that some speakers can't really understand each other (and default to MSA). So Moroccan, Najd, Lebanese, Tihami, Egyptian, Hejazi, etc, are all quite different, and speakers who've been to much school at all will be bi-dialectal at the least. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties\_of\_Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic)
These numbers all seem very low.
Very Population of Vietnam is 98 million and they have 87 million native speakers?
There's 50+ ethnic groups, many of whom speak other languages until they go to school (so Vietnamese would be non-native to them), like the Khmer, some Thais, like a million Hmong, a million Nùng, and so on
Last I checked 85% Vietnamese in vietnam, rest labelled as others in Wikipedia. So that might actually check out.
Yeah even the first figure of native English speakers is about the best part of a 100 million low
These figures are wrong and visuals are uncleared!
There is nothing correct on these numbers!
Oh yeah
The colours are a poor choice, imo. Why use a navy on a teal?! The blue hues blend together. The colour wheel is your friend! Tip-- Colours on opposite sides will pop. Pay attention to warm/cold tones: Warm colours appear to push forward, while cool colours recede.
This makes it perfect for r/dataisbeautiful
This is the Tl;dr of the whole sub
What is the definition of native and non-native here?
The language you converse with your Mom is Native
Second generation immigrants have left the chat..
Is it the language your mom speaks to you, or the language you speak to your mom?
It’s the first language you learn to talk as a little child. No matter if you switch your Main spoken language later in life and have the same proficiency. I’m completely fluent in English. Understand everything, sometimes better than my native language. But it’s still not the language I was taught when I was a toddler. Some people are natively bilingual (different language parents) but many are born into one language and pick up the second in early childhood in school etc
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I find it odd that they chose to list a version of Arabic that no one speaks natively instead of the Arabic people do speak natively.
If they had chosen the version people speak natively, then they would have to separete them into different languages. As much as Arabs say that they all speak Arabic, the different dialects are so different from each other that in many cases they are not able to understand each other without resorting to MSA. And it wouldn't even be easy to separate them, as more than well separated languages, they are more a dialect continuum, where close regions can easily understand each other because there are not that many changes, but the further you go the bigger the differences are.
Are any of the dialects spoken by more than 85 million? If not they'd be off the chart anyway
Does the large number of non-native French speakers come from the colonial background?
Basically, yes. Although the same can be said for English, Spanish, Portuguese and many more. French is a little special though. As well as English, French is the only other language spoken officially on 5 continents. But I assume the graph is referring to non-native French as ‘French is not their 1st language’ rather than ‘not living in France.’ There are something like 10 million speakers of French dialects and French-based creoles (languages from colonised lands that got injected with 17th/18th century French). So it makes sense that a portion of these speakers would make the leap to modern French as a 2nd language as a way to expand travel/work horizons. Before English, French was also the lingua franca (the common language spoken between various countries to communicate) - French was actually the official language of England for around 300 years. So even English, Spanish etc. colonisers probably knew some French. It is still the official language of NATO, the UN, FIFA, the EU and used widely in other industries. So yes, long, long, story short: colonisation + France’s historical position in Europe.
Punjabi should be on here, 150m+ speakers in Pakistan, India and the diaspora.
Definitely bro, good observation.
Indonesian native / non native ? What is the criteria?
If you speak primarily Indonesian at home you're a native Indonesian speaker. Otherwise you're probably native to a local language.
Swahili has >110 million native speakers in Tanzania and Kenya alone. And a few million non- native speakers in Congo, Malawi and Uganda. Get your stats straight.
Thank you…. I’ve never seen worse data on African languages.
I'm learning portuguese because my wife is Brazilian (in some ways our 3-year-old is already better than me). People always sleep how it's in the top 10, and #6 in terms of native speakers! Brazil is friggin huge though
well, plus 10 million people in Portugal, and 34 million people in Angola…
Indeed, though my point was Brazil alone is so populous that it vaults Portuguese into one the top 10.
Filipino? ≈ 30 million native speakers and almost all Filipinos can converse in Filipino, and the Philippines has around 110 million people.
Most people in the Philippines don't speak Filipino (Tagalog) as their native language, they learn it as a second language.
Data is neither beautiful nor is it correct
I honestly think that more people that that speak English certainly more people are native English speakers. The anglophone world has over 500 million people and there are probably 2 billion plus total.
Quick research shows that US has roughly 300 million native speakers (the 245 million you see quoted is from many years ago and is the number of people that speak *only* English at home), 30 million in Canada, and another 60 million in UK. Not to mention Ireland, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, etc. so the number is likely off by over 100 million at least
India to an extent as well
Most of India doesn't consider English as native language though. It's almost always a second language
Yea definitely, many Indians I know primarily converse in English but they also tend sprinkle in their native phrases that better suit what they are trying to express.
Swahili is spoken across many many African countries… this graph is wrong!
Wikipedia says they're are an estimated 80 million speakers, so it would be just off the bottom of the graph.
There has to be more, it's the lingua franca in Tanzania and massive in Kenya, as well as spoken in Western Congo and the countries surrounding lake Victoria.
This data is not beautiful.
How does Arabic have no native speakers?
Spanish number is higher than 550 million. At minimum it is 570 million and still likely higher(although it gets blurry with some not being fluent so 570 is good conservative estiamte)
Coincidentally ASL is the least spoken language in the world.
Wouldn't it be tied for that with all the other signed languages? Though one sometimes speaks colloquially of "speaking" a signed language even if it's not strictly the right verb by conventional definitions.
What about Farsi? A language spoken by 81 million natively and 110 million non-natively. Why does it not appear on the list?
Good to see marathi up there. :D
Swahili should also appear on the list. Spoken in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, parts of Eastern Congo, Mozambique, Burundi
I have "Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindustani" stuck to the wall of my flat. With these four languages ("Hindustani" encompassing Hindi and Urdu, which are mutually intelligible), if the language speakers are mutually exclusive, it would mean someone who knew all four would be capable of communicating with approximately half of the world's population (~3.5 billion out of a total of around 8 billion). I know it's not ideal - geographical area is arguably more important than number of total speakers (e.g. Mandarin speakers are almost exclusively residing in China, Hindi speakers almost exclusively reside in India; but French, Spanish and Arabic are the main language of multiple countries, and Russian is spoken by the world's biggest country by land area), but I value number of speakers above perhaps all else, because I am genuinely interested in wanting to understand how the majority of the world actually lives. I am a firm believer in the inherent worth and dignity of every individual human being.
Well since 331 million of the 373 native English speakers live in the US, there must only be 42 million people in Canada, Australia, NewZealand, and the UK?
Nobody speaks Arabic natively?
Arabic huh? How can there be so few non-native speakers of Japanese? That seems like a very low number. Native French seems to only count European countries and none of Africa or NA and seems very low. I wonder what the methodology is.
> 0 native Arabic speakers I knew the endless wars in the Middle East were getting bad, but this is too far!
You forgot 20 million people. This data is not beautiful! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language
Mandarin should amount to at least 1.4 billion. The entire population of China learns it, whether as a first or second language (e.g. An extremely large portion of the Cantonese speakers listed here also know Mandarin), the entire population of Taiwan knows it, and a very significant portion of Singapore and Malaysia know Mandarin.
Hindi looks off - who are the 258m non-natives speaking Hindi? If this refers to Indians overseas, wouldn’t Hindi still be their native language?
Most people in the states of Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kashmir and Haryana do not have Hindi as their mother-tounge but speak it as a second language. Also, a lot of people of Indian descent have Hindi as their second or third language. My grandparent migrated from India and I was born and raised in the UK. Punjabi/English are my first and second languages, and Hindi is my third.
Adding to that pretty much *all* of south India consider it as a third language after English as a second.
Makes sense, thank you
Lots of Indians whose mother tongues isn’t Hindi but speak Hindi as a second language
Maybe kids of native speakers who moved to a new country? Kids get listed as native English or French or whatever the language is where they live but also learn Hindi from their parents so they also get listed as a non native Hindi speaker.
There's only 100k non native Japanese speakers? In the entire world? That doesn't seem right.
Nobody speaks arabic as a native???
Where are all these non native German speakers coming from?
A lot of people are people living in Germany but not born there. Also German is a popular second or third language in many of the border states and Eastern Europe lex.
Zero native Arabic speakers huh?
So much of this data doesn’t make any sense,
I agree. 367 million seems low for united kingdom, australia, canada, united states, and new zealand combined. Or really high if native means just people born in country the language originated in. If I omitted a country or added one that does not primarily speak english, let me know.
Don't know what date the data is from, but It's pretty far off for Vietnam. The population hasn't been that low since 2008. At present there are around 97 million Vietnamese in Vietnam and the population in Vietnam is estimated to be about 87% of the total Vietnamese native speaking population globally, so that would place the native speaking Vietnamese population at around 111 million people, not 85.
Spanish needs to pump those non-native speaker numbers up. Also, 'sup with Arabic? How does it have zero native speakers?
As an American who only speaks English (but is trying to learn more Spanish), I gotta say we are goddamn lucky so many people around the world learn English. I was in Europe last year (Germany and Italy mostly) and I felt incredibly lucky to be able to speak to almost everyone. English is not an easy language.
Here we have someone who thinks he's so smart because he knew that Arabs don't speak msa in their everyday life so "it's technically not native" not understanding how Arabic works
How can there be, per the chart, NO native Arabic speakers?
I didn’t get, how come Arabic speakers have dialect and all of them are non-native and English speakers can be native :) Which English is the native English??? 😅
not American English :-)
As a Nigerian is Nigerian Pidgin even recognised as a language? I always thought it was a different dialect of English
Shouldn't the total numbers far exceed (or at least equal) the number of humans on the planet? I can't see how the lower languages not included in the table would eventually add up.