This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers.

However, all such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum.^[1]For example, a language is often defined as a set of varieties that are mutually intelligible, but independent national standard languages may be considered to be separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the case of Danish and Norwegian.^[2]Conversely, many commonly accepted languages, including German, Italian and even English, encompass varieties that are not mutually intelligible.^[1]While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors describe its mutually unintelligible varieties as separate languages.^[3]Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language due to shared culture and a single written form.It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though each of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties.^[4]

There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time due to population change and language shift.In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously.Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be under-reported in favour of a national language.^[5]

• 1Top languages by population

Top languages by population

Ethnologue (2019, 22nd edition)

The following 90 languages are listed as having at least 10 million first language speakers in the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, which is based in the United States.^[6]

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Nationalencyklopedin (2010)

The following table contains the top 100 languages by estimated number of native speakers in the 2007 edition of the Swedish encyclopedia Nationalencyklopedin. As census methods in different countries vary to a considerable extent, and given that some countries do not record language in their censuses, any list of languages by native speakers, or total speakers, is effectively based on estimates. Updated estimates from 2010 are also provided.^[8]

The top eleven languages have additional figures from the 2010 edition of the Nationalencyklopedin. Numbers above 95 million are rounded off to the nearest 5 million.

Charts and graphs

• Bubble chart of languages by proportion of native speakers worldwide^[8]

• Languages with at least 50 million first-language speakers, millions (according to: Ethnologue^[10])

See also

• List of languages by number of native speakers in India (uses a different definition of Hindi)

Notes

1. ^Ethnologue counts some dependent territories as countries in its tallies.
2. ^Refers to only Modern Standard Hindi here. The Census of India defines Hindi on a loose and broad basis. It does not include the entire Hindustani language, only the Hindi register of it. In addition to Standard Hindi, it incorporates a set of other Indo-Aryan languages written in Devanagari script including Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Dhundhari etc. under Hindi group which have more than 422 million native speakers as of 2001.^[9] However, the census also acknowledges Standard Hindi, the above mentioned languages and others as separate mother tongues of the Hindi language and provides individual figures for all these languages.^[9]
3. ^ ^abcdefghThis is only a fraction of total speakers; others are counted under 'Hindi' as they regard their language a Hindi dialect.
4. ^Numbers may also be counted in Punjabi above
5. ^Only half this many use Belarusian as their home language.

References

1. ^ ^abPaolillo, John C.; Das, Anupam (31 March 2006). 'Evaluating language statistics: the Ethnologue and beyond'(PDF). UNESCO Institute of Statistics. pp. 3–5. Retrieved 17 November 2018.
2. ^Chambers, J.K.; Trudgill, Peter (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-59646-6.
3. ^Kaye, Alan S.; Rosenhouse, Judith (1997). 'Arabic Dialects and Maltese'. In Hetzron, Robert (ed.). The Semitic Languages. Routledge. pp. 263–311. ISBN978-0-415-05767-7.
4. ^Norman, Jerry (2003). 'The Chinese dialects: phonology'. In Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.). The Sino-Tibetan languages. Routledge. pp. 72–83. ISBN978-0-7007-1129-1.
5. ^Crystal, David (1988). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 286–287. ISBN978-0-521-26438-9.
6. ^ ^ab'Summary by language size'. Ethnologue. Retrieved 12 March 2019. For items below #26, see individual Ethnologue entry for each language.
7. ^'World Population Clock: 7.7 Billion People (2019) - Worldometers'. www.worldometers.info. Retrieved 31 March 2019.
8. ^ ^abMikael Parkvall, 'Världens 100 största språk 2007' (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin. Asterisks mark the 2010 estimates for the top dozen languages.
9. ^ ^abAbstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues – 2000, Census of India, 2001
10. ^Summary by language size

External links

• The Ethnologue's most recent list of languages by number of speakers
• Languages Spoken by More Than 10 Million People (Archived 2009-10-31) – Encarta list, based on data from Ethnologue, but some figures (e.g. for Arabic) widely vary from it

NUMBER: THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

If there is a universal human language, it's the language of numbers. So intuitive and uniform is the idea of numbers, that it is easy to learn and understand them even when spoken in another language. In fact, in most foreign language classes, the 'number words' are some of the first things you learn.

The following table goes over the important word components used to form number words in English, but also in 13 additional languages , including Latin, Greek, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, and many more!

There is also a bonus language not shown on this chart, but there is a link that will take you to it after the chart.

Please note that Greek does not use the standard English alphabet, but rather the Greek alphabet which only contains 24 letters. Some of these letters are analogous to English letters, but others have no counterpart. The Greek number words here are the result of translating Greek letters to approximate English letters based on phonetics (the way the Greek letters are pronounced ). This same approach ( called 'transliteration' ) has been used on the Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swahili , Sanskrit, and Thai languages.

The following two tables display all the word components you would need to count to a thousand in no less than 14 different languages. These will come in handy later as you will see, for naming large numbers. Here's the first 7 languages:

Here is an additional 7 languages:

There is also urdu which is very unusual. I would have listed it with the other languages, but the construction for the first 100 counting numbers is irregular and doesn't follow the constructions above. Free tekken game. If your interested you can learn about urdu numbers at this link .. Urdu numbers .

Now that I have given a sampling of the notations and naming conventions used for numbers throughout the world and through history, I would like to present my own unique naming convention.

The next article explains the impetus for this construction. Basically it provides short names for the first 1000 or so counting numbers !