The ten most spoken languages are,

according to the CIA World Factbook 2005:

1. Mandarin Chinese - 882,475,389
2. Spanish - 325,529,636
3. English - 311,992,760
4. Hindi - 181,780,905
5. Portuguese - 178,557,840
6. Bengali - 172,756,322
7. Russian - 146,327,183
8. Japanese - 128,278,015
9. German - 96,047,358
10. Wu Chinese - 77,998,190

Comments

Anonymous said…
Okay then, where do American and French fit into these statistics or do they come much, much further down the list?
2:38 am
Anonymous said…
Just as an afterthought, how come they can be so specific that they can end their calculations with the actual digit, e.g. the '9' of Mandarin Chinese, and for just how long and at what point in time was that accurate? Mind you, if it's the C.I.A. that are providing the figures, they just have to be right with their phenominal intelligence gathering abilities. Just think of 'weapons of mass destruction'! I won't repeat the joke about Al Gebra and his weapons of, well, you know what Alan.
2:50 am
Alan said…
Yes. Wikipedia reckons that some 120 million people speak French, and there's 60 million in France alone, so I think the figures need some explanation or interpretation.

For those who are not aware of the Al Gebra thing I put it below:

LONDON -- A public school teacher was arrested today at Heathrow
International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of maths instruction.

"Al-gebra is a problem for us," Goldsmith said. "They desire solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a
common denominator of the axis of medieval with co-ordinates in every
country.
7:51 am
PGDH said…
It's a shame Dubya didn't actually say it, but I suspect the real reason is that the French really don't have a word for 'entrepreneur'.
3:03 pm
Tom King said…
Isn't it likely that it's referring to actual spoken languages rather than official languages, as if it were the latter, English would be first as it would include India's entire population?

So I assume it's some sort of census type malarkey.

Still, it's nice to be 3rd and 5th!
4:01 pm
Alan said…
It's a very confusing set of statistics really - after all, if there are 60 million Frenchmen in France speaking French, then there don't need to be that many French-speaking people in the francophonie to exceed the 77 million Wu Chinese speakers!

As for Dubbya - if he had said it it would have been pronounced very weirdly!
4:40 pm
Anonymous said…
Thanks for that link Phil, that's an interesting blog. Alan, there's one thing that still perplexes me and I'm surprised that no-one else has noticed the glaring omission in these statistics - there's no mention of Welsh!!! Where does that fit in? (Good question that Ken, where does it fit in?)

As for the algebra, I knew that it was an Arabic word and, if my memory serves me correctly, (and in honesty, it rarely does), the words 'al' and 'el' mean 'the', but the rest left me completely in the dark - as does algebra itself. Somewhat similar to Hebrew and the equivalent of the French 'le' and 'la'. However, I have the online etymological dictionary in my list of favourites and the entry for 'algebra' is as follows:- algebra
1551, from M.L. from Arabic al jebr "reunion of broken parts" as in computation, used 9c. by Baghdad mathematician Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi as the title of his famous treatise on equations ("Kitab al-Jabr w'al-Muqabala" "Rules of Reintegration and Reduction"), which also introduced Arabic numerals to the West. The accent shifted 17c. from second syllable to first. The word was used in Eng. 15c.-16c. to mean "bone-setting," probably from the Arabs in Spain.

So now you all know!
11:15 pm
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