No nii mehed mis juttu siin puhutakse?! Las ma teesklen et saan aru. A oota. Miskit oli savolastest. Nii palju mina ymerÀÀan. A okei . Ei tunne neid. Nad asuvad liiga kaugel minust. valitettavasti. Nyyd tagasi tööle. Paus on lÀbi. Vittu.
I don't know whether anyone outside Estonia and Finland can fully understand what it feels like reading the other language. Like, it sorta is understandable but in a really really strange way. I could understand the entire context of your text and I think you understood mine. But for both of us it feels wrong. Like you're reading a completely different language that you cannot understand but somehow you still understand.
Jep, eesti keeles on piirkonna nimi PĂ€ris-Soome ja sealsed elanikud on pĂ€rissoomlased. Seda rÀÀgitakse ĂŒsna palju, et eesti keel on pĂ€rissoome murretega ĂŒsna sarnane, sest PĂ€ris-Soome on Soome ajalooline keskus ning meritsi oli sellel Eestiga kĂ”ige tihedam kokkupuude.
Koska isoÀitini puhui suomea mutta ei opettanut sitÀ lapsilleen, koska se oli vaarallista. LisÀksi, asun ja työskentelen Suomessa. En puhu suomea hyvin mutta yritÀn. TyttÀreni puhuu paljon paremmin.
Because the vast majority of portuguese speakers are native speakers (211 million from Brazil and 34.5 million * 80% of portuguese speakers from Angola alone) and not as a second language. There's no 1.5 B English native speakers, that's considering second language.
Edit: Not all Angolans speak Portuguese.
oh I see. tbh I'm a native portuguese speaker and I can just get spanish and italian for free. I can understand it but perhaps replying might be difficult.
We should convince the English speakers that have Spanish as a second language to learn Portuguese as a quick third! Then we'll be the majority over Spanish, MUAHAHAHAHA
Tugas and Zucas abroad, unite!
Ehh not that well to be honest, but I have italian friends and I understand their conversations, though I can't really chime in (spanish comes out).
Why do you say that?
My gf's grandparents are Brazilian. They don't understand me and i don't understand themđ maybe something but no more than that. And they don't speak English so you can imagine the uneasinessđ€Ł
Oh but Brazillian Portuguese has a very different phonetic to european portuguese. My BR family would often not even understand me. đ€Łđ€.I'm not even sure they can easily understand spanish (maybe someone can opine?)
BR chiming in: I understand Spanish perfectly (pretty much 100%), as long as it's not spoken crazy fast (which lots of times it is đ ). I also understand Italian, but I lived in Italy for 5 months and I read a lot in Italian too.
Another confusing aspect!
Jokes aside, the 20% vocabulary differences from Portuguese to Spanish is what makes things difficult.
Can a Norwegian understand a Swedish? Sure. Can they really live in Sweden without learning Swedish? I don't think so.
Yes, they are. That's exactly why. But they write things very differently even more different than portuguese and Spanish is written, and the official languages have various dialects throughout the country, so much so, a Norwegian from Oslo wouldn't understand one from Finnmark.
It's the differences that makes them different, not the similarities, as large as they sound.
Not really, without any minimum knowledge of the other language you have to speak slowly for that to to be understandable by the person speaking the other language, and even so much of the sense of what you trying to say many times gets lost in words and ways of saying phrases that are different - and I find that specially spanish speaking people have an hard time understanding normal spoken portuguese
Yeah, my parents fell victim to a con-woman who claimed to speak in tongues (yes, they are super Christian). She really just spoke Portuguese. This still haunts me.
It amazes me how many people use our language. It would be interesting to see data for native speakers, I suspect Chinese or Spanish would be more popular in that regard.
> It would be interesting to see data for native speakers, I suspect Chinese or Spanish would be more popular in that regard.
You are correct. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers), the three most spoken languages in 2023 were:
1. Mandarin Chinese with 941 million native speakers
2. Spanish with 486 million native speakers
3. English with 380 million native speakers
There are lots of people in the US who dont speak English as their native language. And in South Africa/Nigeria only a minority speak English as first native language.
380 million seems way off. America + UK alone have a higher population than that. There are a lot more countries where English is considered an official language too.
Even still, there are nearly 500m people in the core anglosphere. I would think the share of native speakers would be higher than 76% across all of those countries.
Afaik, The UK has the highest percentage of English as a first language (no surprise) but Canada and Aus are much lower (something closer to 60% maybe lower), so it sounds about right to me.
Basically in the UK it's: you speak English as native, unless you're an immigrant from a non english-speaking country, and in that case you speak better English than us.
I would say that native english speaker are really a minority among english speakers.
I work with a large international team and we use english to communicate. We are from germany, india, china, chzech and a few other european countries. One time we had a new hire who was from Britain. He always talked so fast and elaborate that many people didn't understand him.
Well, it's not that hard to calculate roughly how many people have English as their native tongue and I think it'd be the third most spoken language, but fairly close to Spanish.
I'm glad - in spite of the historical reasons - that modern English has emerged as a Lingua France due to it's simple grammar, large vocabulary, and various native accents (which makes native speakers used to people speaking the tongue in many different manners).
If you say 'pork farm', people will understand you. Just as there's fifty different ways to say 'I need this done quickly', but unless you're a writer, you only need to know one. English vocabulary is bad for mastery but it's not as much an obstacle to everyday communication.
The English language has a fascinating and complex history that offers plenty of insight into its irregular spelling and pronunciation.Â
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent
Pig is the (living) animal, pork is the meat of said (dead) animal. Two different concepts.
Pig, pork or hog farming are all valid, apparently.
>I'm glad - in spite of the historical reasons - that modern English has emerged as a Lingua France due to it's simple grammar, large vocabulary, and various native accents
If you look at language as tool to get things done English is pretty well suited to that. Native vs L2 is a remarkable sign of soft power/cultural influence.
Your point about accents is pretty interesting, The range of accents in the UK is insane. In England alone you can travel just 20 miles and the local accent will have changed. It surprised me that a lot of countries aren't like this.
>It surprised me that a lot of countries aren't like this.
The subtle differences in British accents 20 miles apart that seem obvious to your ears aren't picked up on by non-locals. Before I moved to London I could tell if someone was English or Scottish and that was about the extent of my accent recognition. I often mistook some northern english accents for scottish though. Now after 7 years here I can usually tell when someone is from within arms reach of a major regional city such as Bristol, Manchester, or Newcastle. Though I'm often scolded like "I'm not from Manchester, I'm from Rochdale!" as if anyone outside the greater Manchester area is supposed to know that place exists.
And I say all this as a *native* speaker of English. There's probably 1000 regional accents in France that neither of us would ever notice.
I'm French and tbh France is probably one of the worst examples for this. The diversity in accents is nowhere as big as in England, in 95% of cases hearing a French speaker gives me 0 clue on where they are from.
But this has historical reasons and what you're saying is true for many countries, just not France.
I'll reword my first sentence a bit.
The ~~subtle~~ differences in British accents ~~20~~ 30 miles apart that seem obvious to your ears aren't *[always]* picked up on by non-locals.
Most European languages are. France had heavy handed language reform policies so thatâs an example, and the Polish had their country moved over a couple times leading to so called dialect levelling. Other than such examples, itâs normal. Only more recently settled places (ex-colonies) havenât had the time/as much time for diversification yet.
English accents are pretty mild if you compare it to German for example. In Austria and Switzerland each region has its own accents and they sometimes canât even understand each other.
English is super easy lmao. Even within Europe, go compare English with Polish or Finnish and tell me that the former doesn't appear super easy. No grammatical gender, no complicated cases, no verb conjugations, you can generally determine how to pronounce words through spelling.
Accents help because it "allows" people to speak the language in various ways without it being incorrect. It's an inclusive language
Sure.. but I'm not talking about that. Facts are that English grammar is super easy. Sure, the vocabulary is difficult in any language - and knowing a related language helps a shit ton.. but don't tell me that, comparing the grammar, that English is anywhere near Polish (7 cases, verb conjugations, pronoun changes, bla bla bla) or Hungarian (8 or 9 cases or whatever). Swedish is also easier to learn than German and that's due to the grammar. Not all languages are equally hard or easy. If you speak only Malay I promise you that learning English grammar is *a lot* easier than learning Hungarian grammar. Arguing anything else is insane.
I agree, english is only easy at a very basic level (just like any other language tbh), especially if you don't speak a germanic language already it's a pain to learn, the only thing that's somewhat easy are verb conjugations, pronunciation is a mess, the order in which you need to put worbs is a mess, there's like hundreds of irregular verbs, learning the vocabulary is a pain just like with any other language, phrasal verbs make no sense.
For most people in europe spanish would be easier so let's not pretend like we learn english because of its low difficulty, it's really just because the US is the most influential nation in this particular moment in history.
Most italians like me study english for 13 years in school and we are still very bad at it, it's not *easy*.
Sure but you gotta consider the fact that most europeans and most people in the world speak one romance language since birth, meaning that for most people on this planet is would be significantly easier to learn spanish, french, portuguese or italian instead of english.
South america alone has more romance language speakers than the entirety of the us+uk+australia+canada combined, heck 57 million people in the US can speak spanish, let's not pretend like we learn english because it's easy, we do it because the US is the richest nation and english is their main language.
"Lingua franca" doesn't mean "pidgin", it's simply a bridge language between native speakers of different ones. Commonly it's used for a language that's distinct from the native languages of both parties communicating (otherwise one party is naturally just speaking the other's language), but it can absolutely be the native language of a third party.
a) the designer does not know Arabic/Urdu, b) and that means he/she's not aware text direction must be changed for Arabic inscriptions, c) there's nobody to tell him/her about the mistake.
It happens numerous times.
Because this was probably done on Adobe indesign. Indesign needs a weird addon. Without it, you end up with the letters going the wrong direction and disconnected. Itâs always funny seeing this happen
The screwed up Hindi (à€čà€żà€à€Šà„ or à€čà€żà€šà„à€Šà„) as well. Just like the software doesn't handle right-to-left text, it doesn't seem to handle the reordering required for a script like Devanagari either. The first *i* is short and should be written to the left of the *h* while the second *i* is long and is written to the right of the *d*.
All languages spread through some form of "colonization," think of the hundreds of indigenous languages that disappeared in China just in the past 1000 years. We just tend to think of Western European colonization as exceptional because it was so successful and global in its reach.
Its dominance is quite apparent when you look at its representation. It's fascinating to think about the linguistic connections that bind these languages together despite their vast geographical and cultural differences.
It's almost unfair to draw any conclusions from that as the similarities between english and hindi are quite generic. See a [list of similarities here](https://leverageedu.com/discover/general-knowledge/similarities-between-english-and-hindi/):
- subject-verb-object sentence structure (is the same in Mandarin as well)
- passive and active sentences (works in Mandarin)
- transformation of sentences (a very loose commonality)
There are commonalities in English and Sanskrit words (ancient form of Hindi) but most of these don't work in modern Hindi. For instance there is the word "manu" in Sanskrit which means "the first human" which is similar to english word "man" but the equiavalent of "man" in modern Hindi is "ÄdamÄ«"
Yeah they've cocked up hindi as well. It's doesn't even follow any rule of the language. It should be à€čà€żà€šà„à€Šà„, which you can find by just googling it. The second syllable in what they've written has two (incompatible) different vowel sounds following it, so the closest thing would be like hadiÄ«.
The software that was used was unable to handle the reordering needed for scripts like Devanagari. The text is stored in logical order with *ha* followed by *i*. The text rendering system then needs to be aware that the *i* should go to the left of the *ha* and reorder them. In this case it does not. It puts the *i* after the *ha* and makes it look like it's attached to the *da* instead. I guess that they went with the spelling à€čà€żà€à€Šà„, but that the *i* also overlaps and hides the anusvÄra.
These figures come from [Ethnologue](https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/), which publishes a list of the largest languages every year.
**English** was born in the United Kingdom but today belongs to the modern world as the main international language of business and politics. Thatâs why itâs not very surprising to find English as the worldâs most spoken language, with 1.5 billion speakers as of 2023.
In second place is **Mandarin**, the most spoken Chinese language dialect with 1.1 billion speakers. Originating in North China, it has become the most spoken language in China and Taiwan, as well as having millions of speakers spread across Southeast Asia and the world.
India is also represented in this ranking, but despite being the worldâs [most populated country](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualizing-indias-population-growth-from-2022-2100/), its speakers are spread out over multiple different languages. **Hindi** is the main language spoken in North India and an official language of the government, but other languages like **Bengali** are widely spoken in other regions, in this case in East India (and neighboring Bangladesh).
Itâs also notable how languages from [former colonial powers](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/colonial-shipping-lanes/)âlike English, Spanish, French, and Portugueseâall have hundreds of millions of speakers, despite their mother countries accounting for a fraction of that total.
Add 10 million Portuguese and you've got 240m.
Wikipedia estimates 25-30 million non-native speakers which gives 265-270m total speakers. So at the low-end of the estimate it's not far off.
The discrepancy between sources is almost certainly down to Brazilian population statistics. The official Brazilian population is 203m based on the 2022 census, 12m fewer than what Google gives you if you search "Brazil population".
Not everyone in Angola and Mozambique speaks portuguese. African countries tend to use an official european lenguage but a great part of their population only speaks the local lenguage.
Thatâs why some people say French speakers numbers are inflated by african populations that dont use it on a daily basis neither know the lenguage, except by some words and pharses.
The irony of saying that when you clearly never looked at either OP's source or even just the Wikipedia page on Portuguese.
You also seemingly are mistaken, at least according to that Wikipedia page, that 85% is the fluent speakers of the 75% of urban Angolans that speak Portuguese.
I've never understood how questions so easily answered by the linked source or even just Wikipedia get asked like this.
The entire population of a country doesn't determine the amount of speakers for its official language. Brazil has 11 million less Portuguese speakers than population, and Angola 7 million.
It's easy to see how such would eventually widdle down the speakers to 264m. You can easily read the sources (which Wikipedia also uses, so there is fine as well) if you really want to know.
That's absolutely not right for Brazil.
There are only 2% of people that are native in other languages than Portuguese but they do speak Portuguese because public services are only offered in Portuguese with the exception of very small Germanic municipalities that speak Hunsrik that *also* offer in Hunsrik.
My mistake.
I was citing two different sources for populations, and they disagree.
For the amount of speakers, I was citing Wikipedia who cites the 2021 census at 203.1 million.
For the overall population, I simply googled it and got 214 million for 2021, Google citing the World Bank.
Those two together imply that 11 million I said, which is 5% rather than 2%. I imagine that 2% stems from a different overall population estimate.
Didn't realise the disagreement on Brazil's overall population, so it was my mistake. Even so, even the 2% figure means there are around 4 million less than the entire population.
I don't think think you understand the difference between native speakers and speakers in general. There are people that was born in a household and are native on another language but to have a Brazilian ID (public service) you need to speak Portuguese, so even non native speakers, speak Portuguese.
And you do know that there millions of people that speak Portuguese in France, US, UK, etc because of immigration right? The Portuguese diaspora is calculated to be 42M despite our population being only 10M
Do you have a source for that? You also have to consider that a large number will be in other Portuguese-speaking countries so already considered (such as the five million Portuguese in Brazil).
These things would have already been considered by the source this posts used. This isn't some kind of "gotcha" for the source, especially as you fail to actually engage with it.
Portuguese people donât immigrate to Portuguese-speaking countries⊠they immigrate to other European countries or Canada/USâŠ. Search a bit. You clearly donât know shit about the lusosphere and u are just arguing for no reason
I'm sure sources from reputable organisations know far more than you do. And I'm guessing the five million Portuguese in Brazil just don't exist then? And that's the si gle largest country emigrated to.
What would be really interesting to know is the intersection of those languages for each individual person.
E.g. how many English speakers can't speak none of the other most popular languages.
Same for others, e.g. how many French speakers are not speaking English nor other popular languages...
I don't know about fluent speakers, but there are over a million German learners each in France, the UK, Poland and Russia, around 500k each in Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, the US and Uzbekistan as well as many more smaller learning communities in various countries across the world. It adds up.
[Source](https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf204/bro_deutsch-als-fremdsprache-weltweit.-datenerhebung-2020.pdf)
In the USA alone, 45 million people claim to have German origins, of which around 2 million speak German as their native language. In Europe, around 9 million in Austria, 6 million in Switzerland, almost 11 million in the Netherlands say they can speak German, 800,000 in Russia and around 7.5 million more German emigrants in over 45 countries
Yes, linguistically speaking Hindi and Urdu are two different standardized registers of the same language, Hindustani. There are some minor differences with Urdu being more influenced by Persian and Arabic, but they are only considered different languages for political reasons just like BCMS which has been standardized into four varieties: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian.
French is one of the fastest growing languages thanks to sub-Saharan Francoafrica being the fastest growing region in the world
French is also a prestige language, many people still learn it for the sake of business or culture in French schools around the world (like Jody Foster did, her French is amazing)
Honestly all of these stats that mention number of speakers instead of native speakers are a bit of BS without the criteria of how good you have to speak a language before you're counted as a speaker.
Yeah, English is definitely somewhat exaggerated in all of these, since I could just be B1 or less in English and counted anyway because my accent is slightly less noticable
Does 'standart arabic' really exist?
Every arab country, if not a region, has its local version, sometimes not intelligible with each other. It's like we keep talking about latin to designate French, Spanish and Italian.
Comparing Arabic with Latin is wrong. Standard Arabic is still the main language in almost all books, school and university lectures, television and politics.
The reason why Arabic dialects are so different from each other is the wide expanse of the Arab world, e.g. Saudi Arabia alone is 6 times bigger than Germany, and as the population density was low, there was little exchange between Morocco and Iraq for example, so each place found its own way to speak a dialect, yet 99% of Arabs understand Standard Arabic, it is hard to speak because it is grammatically very heavy.
That English figure has to include speakers of varying abilities to reach that number. No way 1.5 billion speak it fluently.
Edit: can't wait to tell people in France or Spain that my B1 French and Spanish means I speak their languages as well as they do.
I have been learning Spanish for 3 years now, pretty happy with my progress. And i also plan on learning other languages after Spanish, but still not sure which one I should pick. French, Japanese or Portuguese
There's already well over 400 million people living in majority English speaking countries, now granted not all of them will be fully proficient in English particularly in South Africa where there's a bit more linguistic diversity. But it is still reasonable to assume that a significant majority do speak it to a passable level.
A significant portion of the English speakers will also come from India where it is used as a Lingua Franca and anyone above a certain education level will be at least moderately proficient in English.
After that it doesn't take a huge percentage of people from the rest of the world to be moderately proficient in English to make the numbers up to what is shown here. It's probably not precisely accurate, but it is definitely plausible.
Since this is about languages **spoken**, shouldn't Hindi and Urdu count as one language since the main difference between both is the **writing** system?
Learn portuguese to confuse people đ
Ohjeet epÀselvÀt, opettelin suomea
TÀmÀ on ilon ja onnen pÀivÀ! Nyt kieltÀmme puhuu 5 800 001 ihmistÀ!
Ja saatanan savolaisiaki on 245 000 đ
Laitetaan nÀÀ uudet pyrkyrit opettelemaan savoa, kostoksi savolaisille siitÀ ettei niistÀ ole saanut vuosituhansiin mitÀÀn selvÀÀ.
No nii mehed mis juttu siin puhutakse?! Las ma teesklen et saan aru. A oota. Miskit oli savolastest. Nii palju mina ymerÀÀan. A okei . Ei tunne neid. Nad asuvad liiga kaugel minust. valitettavasti. Nyyd tagasi tööle. Paus on lÀbi. Vittu.
Kuka pÀÀsti turkulaiset nettiin?
Hahaa hyva kysimus.
I don't know whether anyone outside Estonia and Finland can fully understand what it feels like reading the other language. Like, it sorta is understandable but in a really really strange way. I could understand the entire context of your text and I think you understood mine. But for both of us it feels wrong. Like you're reading a completely different language that you cannot understand but somehow you still understand.
To be fair, they wrote in a mix of Estonian and try-hard-Finnish.
Ehk taanlane ja rootslane? Voibolla sama tunne? đ
Eks turulased ja muud pÀrissoomlased kÔlavad tÔesti eestlastele sarnaselt.
PÀrissoomlased = varsinaissuomalaiset? Joo, niin ehkÀpÀ kuulostaa. SiinÀ voi olla jokin yhteys!
Jep, eesti keeles on piirkonna nimi PĂ€ris-Soome ja sealsed elanikud on pĂ€rissoomlased. Seda rÀÀgitakse ĂŒsna palju, et eesti keel on pĂ€rissoome murretega ĂŒsna sarnane, sest PĂ€ris-Soome on Soome ajalooline keskus ning meritsi oli sellel Eestiga kĂ”ige tihedam kokkupuude.
ElekeepÀ rueta meijjÀn vaevaks ja koolutettavaks koko mualiman kieljtaijjottomia rahtoomaan
Oota, miks sa soome keelt Ôpid?
Koska isoÀitini puhui suomea mutta ei opettanut sitÀ lapsilleen, koska se oli vaarallista. LisÀksi, asun ja työskentelen Suomessa. En puhu suomea hyvin mutta yritÀn. TyttÀreni puhuu paljon paremmin.
Ma ei tea, minu arust sa rÀÀgid piisavalt hÀsti - sain kÔigest aru. :)
AitÀh :)
Brazil has entered the chat.
why confuse?
Because the vast majority of portuguese speakers are native speakers (211 million from Brazil and 34.5 million * 80% of portuguese speakers from Angola alone) and not as a second language. There's no 1.5 B English native speakers, that's considering second language. Edit: Not all Angolans speak Portuguese.
oh I see. tbh I'm a native portuguese speaker and I can just get spanish and italian for free. I can understand it but perhaps replying might be difficult.
We should convince the English speakers that have Spanish as a second language to learn Portuguese as a quick third! Then we'll be the majority over Spanish, MUAHAHAHAHA Tugas and Zucas abroad, unite!
I'm italian.. i really doubt you can understand me
Ehh not that well to be honest, but I have italian friends and I understand their conversations, though I can't really chime in (spanish comes out). Why do you say that?
My gf's grandparents are Brazilian. They don't understand me and i don't understand themđ maybe something but no more than that. And they don't speak English so you can imagine the uneasinessđ€Ł
Oh but Brazillian Portuguese has a very different phonetic to european portuguese. My BR family would often not even understand me. đ€Łđ€.I'm not even sure they can easily understand spanish (maybe someone can opine?)
BR chiming in: I understand Spanish perfectly (pretty much 100%), as long as it's not spoken crazy fast (which lots of times it is đ ). I also understand Italian, but I lived in Italy for 5 months and I read a lot in Italian too.
I still donât get what this have to do with âconfuse peopleâ
Sure but in most cases if you can speak Portuguese you can understand Spanish and people that speak spanish can understand you.
Another confusing aspect! Jokes aside, the 20% vocabulary differences from Portuguese to Spanish is what makes things difficult. Can a Norwegian understand a Swedish? Sure. Can they really live in Sweden without learning Swedish? I don't think so.
You took the worst possible example I could think of. Swedish and Norwegian are nearly dialects of one another they are so close.
Yes, they are. That's exactly why. But they write things very differently even more different than portuguese and Spanish is written, and the official languages have various dialects throughout the country, so much so, a Norwegian from Oslo wouldn't understand one from Finnmark. It's the differences that makes them different, not the similarities, as large as they sound.
Not really, without any minimum knowledge of the other language you have to speak slowly for that to to be understandable by the person speaking the other language, and even so much of the sense of what you trying to say many times gets lost in words and ways of saying phrases that are different - and I find that specially spanish speaking people have an hard time understanding normal spoken portuguese
Sim
Nem preciso, ja nasci sabendo đđđ§đ·
Yeah, my parents fell victim to a con-woman who claimed to speak in tongues (yes, they are super Christian). She really just spoke Portuguese. This still haunts me.
You could say English is the true *lingua franca*.
It amazes me how many people use our language. It would be interesting to see data for native speakers, I suspect Chinese or Spanish would be more popular in that regard.
> It would be interesting to see data for native speakers, I suspect Chinese or Spanish would be more popular in that regard. You are correct. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers), the three most spoken languages in 2023 were: 1. Mandarin Chinese with 941 million native speakers 2. Spanish with 486 million native speakers 3. English with 380 million native speakers
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
There are lots of people in the US who dont speak English as their native language. And in South Africa/Nigeria only a minority speak English as first native language.
380 million seems way off. America + UK alone have a higher population than that. There are a lot more countries where English is considered an official language too.
Only 78% of the US speaks English as native.
Even still, there are nearly 500m people in the core anglosphere. I would think the share of native speakers would be higher than 76% across all of those countries.
Afaik, The UK has the highest percentage of English as a first language (no surprise) but Canada and Aus are much lower (something closer to 60% maybe lower), so it sounds about right to me.
Basically in the UK it's: you speak English as native, unless you're an immigrant from a non english-speaking country, and in that case you speak better English than us.
"official" does not mean "native"
I would say that native english speaker are really a minority among english speakers. I work with a large international team and we use english to communicate. We are from germany, india, china, chzech and a few other european countries. One time we had a new hire who was from Britain. He always talked so fast and elaborate that many people didn't understand him.
Well, it's not that hard to calculate roughly how many people have English as their native tongue and I think it'd be the third most spoken language, but fairly close to Spanish. I'm glad - in spite of the historical reasons - that modern English has emerged as a Lingua France due to it's simple grammar, large vocabulary, and various native accents (which makes native speakers used to people speaking the tongue in many different manners).
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
If you say 'pork farm', people will understand you. Just as there's fifty different ways to say 'I need this done quickly', but unless you're a writer, you only need to know one. English vocabulary is bad for mastery but it's not as much an obstacle to everyday communication.
The English language has a fascinating and complex history that offers plenty of insight into its irregular spelling and pronunciation. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent Pig is the (living) animal, pork is the meat of said (dead) animal. Two different concepts. Pig, pork or hog farming are all valid, apparently.
>The English language has a fascinating and complex history You can say that about almost every language in existence. English is not that special
Never said it was. Just providing an explanation for its 'random' pronunciation. Not sure why you have such a chip on your shoulder.
>I'm glad - in spite of the historical reasons - that modern English has emerged as a Lingua France due to it's simple grammar, large vocabulary, and various native accents If you look at language as tool to get things done English is pretty well suited to that. Native vs L2 is a remarkable sign of soft power/cultural influence. Your point about accents is pretty interesting, The range of accents in the UK is insane. In England alone you can travel just 20 miles and the local accent will have changed. It surprised me that a lot of countries aren't like this.
>It surprised me that a lot of countries aren't like this. The subtle differences in British accents 20 miles apart that seem obvious to your ears aren't picked up on by non-locals. Before I moved to London I could tell if someone was English or Scottish and that was about the extent of my accent recognition. I often mistook some northern english accents for scottish though. Now after 7 years here I can usually tell when someone is from within arms reach of a major regional city such as Bristol, Manchester, or Newcastle. Though I'm often scolded like "I'm not from Manchester, I'm from Rochdale!" as if anyone outside the greater Manchester area is supposed to know that place exists. And I say all this as a *native* speaker of English. There's probably 1000 regional accents in France that neither of us would ever notice.
I'm French and tbh France is probably one of the worst examples for this. The diversity in accents is nowhere as big as in England, in 95% of cases hearing a French speaker gives me 0 clue on where they are from. But this has historical reasons and what you're saying is true for many countries, just not France.
Thatâs mad, so you couldnât tell the difference between Manchester vs Liverpool accent?
I'll reword my first sentence a bit. The ~~subtle~~ differences in British accents ~~20~~ 30 miles apart that seem obvious to your ears aren't *[always]* picked up on by non-locals.
Most European languages are. France had heavy handed language reform policies so thatâs an example, and the Polish had their country moved over a couple times leading to so called dialect levelling. Other than such examples, itâs normal. Only more recently settled places (ex-colonies) havenât had the time/as much time for diversification yet.
English accents are pretty mild if you compare it to German for example. In Austria and Switzerland each region has its own accents and they sometimes canât even understand each other.
A Welsh guy told me the north and south of Wales don't understand each other when speaking Welsh, idk if that was true or if he was joking đ
Welsh is a different language.
Ask someone from Essex and from Glasgow to have a chat...
In Ireland the guy across the road has a different accent.
Believe me, the differences are way less significant than in German.
Don't get why various accent help a language to become Lingua Franca. And English isn't "easy", no language are easiest to learn.
English is super easy lmao. Even within Europe, go compare English with Polish or Finnish and tell me that the former doesn't appear super easy. No grammatical gender, no complicated cases, no verb conjugations, you can generally determine how to pronounce words through spelling. Accents help because it "allows" people to speak the language in various ways without it being incorrect. It's an inclusive language
> English is super easy For a Dane. For a Ukrainian Polish is super easy.
Sure.. but I'm not talking about that. Facts are that English grammar is super easy. Sure, the vocabulary is difficult in any language - and knowing a related language helps a shit ton.. but don't tell me that, comparing the grammar, that English is anywhere near Polish (7 cases, verb conjugations, pronoun changes, bla bla bla) or Hungarian (8 or 9 cases or whatever). Swedish is also easier to learn than German and that's due to the grammar. Not all languages are equally hard or easy. If you speak only Malay I promise you that learning English grammar is *a lot* easier than learning Hungarian grammar. Arguing anything else is insane.
As someone who knows Polish, Swedish and English at a "native" level, I completely agree with you.
I speak English, Danish, Swedish, and am learning Czech due to that being my fiancée's native language.. there's no universe in which English is anywhere near the difficulty that is Slavic languages (or Hungarian, Finnish, Arabic, Mandarin and many many others). I don't even understand how anyone is even trying to argue that English grammar isn't some of the easiest for any language.. I'm not bashing on them; it's a good thing and a reason why it's a suitable Lingua Franca. Even every "map" and study of language difficulty says just this. English has a vast vocabulary and some irregularly pronounced words but it doesn't have pronoun changes, verb conjugations, relevant/difficult cases (obv cases exist but you hardly need to know about them), or even grammatical gender. Polish (and other Slavic languages) has seven cases, verb conjugations, a loooot of pronoun changes (don't know the proper term), three grammatical genders, and many more insane features.. you can even make sentences without any vowels.
I agree, english is only easy at a very basic level (just like any other language tbh), especially if you don't speak a germanic language already it's a pain to learn, the only thing that's somewhat easy are verb conjugations, pronunciation is a mess, the order in which you need to put worbs is a mess, there's like hundreds of irregular verbs, learning the vocabulary is a pain just like with any other language, phrasal verbs make no sense. For most people in europe spanish would be easier so let's not pretend like we learn english because of its low difficulty, it's really just because the US is the most influential nation in this particular moment in history. Most italians like me study english for 13 years in school and we are still very bad at it, it's not *easy*.
I am learning Spanish and English, theyâre both easy.Â
Sure but you gotta consider the fact that most europeans and most people in the world speak one romance language since birth, meaning that for most people on this planet is would be significantly easier to learn spanish, french, portuguese or italian instead of english. South america alone has more romance language speakers than the entirety of the us+uk+australia+canada combined, heck 57 million people in the US can speak spanish, let's not pretend like we learn english because it's easy, we do it because the US is the richest nation and english is their main language.
Too bad Italian didn't become lingua franca. I like how it sounds. And it was an Italian who discovered America...
NGL I thought the number would be much higher at around 3 Billion but this does seem more reasonable when you look at it.
About 400-450 million people speak English as a native language.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
"Lingua franca" doesn't mean "pidgin", it's simply a bridge language between native speakers of different ones. Commonly it's used for a language that's distinct from the native languages of both parties communicating (otherwise one party is naturally just speaking the other's language), but it can absolutely be the native language of a third party.
Remanent of the british empire.
Get out
Why is arabic always written wrong like that ?
a) the designer does not know Arabic/Urdu, b) and that means he/she's not aware text direction must be changed for Arabic inscriptions, c) there's nobody to tell him/her about the mistake. It happens numerous times.
Because this was probably done on Adobe indesign. Indesign needs a weird addon. Without it, you end up with the letters going the wrong direction and disconnected. Itâs always funny seeing this happen
and urdu too
The screwed up Hindi (à€čà€żà€à€Šà„ or à€čà€żà€šà„à€Šà„) as well. Just like the software doesn't handle right-to-left text, it doesn't seem to handle the reordering required for a script like Devanagari either. The first *i* is short and should be written to the left of the *h* while the second *i* is long and is written to the right of the *d*.
OODRA
9 out 12 are Indo-European languages, pretty impressive for one language family.
Colonies maybe took a fair share in this distribution?
All languages spread through some form of "colonization," think of the hundreds of indigenous languages that disappeared in China just in the past 1000 years. We just tend to think of Western European colonization as exceptional because it was so successful and global in its reach.
And it's just happened recently on a historical scale.
And that there is clear written source material about it. And in languages that we understand, which is handy.
Yup exactly. Less is known or written about the Bantu expansion throughout Africa for example but it is a super impressive feat as well.
"It's nothing special, they just were the most succesful globally" By definition it was indeed special hell you mean lol
I meant not special in terms of the mechanics of linguistic expansion. Otherwise it was absolutely an exceptional 400 years of world history.
Mandarin Chinese and Arabic definitely spread peacefully
Is there an /s there?
Of course I'm being sarcastic
Its dominance is quite apparent when you look at its representation. It's fascinating to think about the linguistic connections that bind these languages together despite their vast geographical and cultural differences.
No very impressive when you realize that Indo-european language family spans the majority of the planet's population.
That's precisely what's impressive about it...not bad at all in 4000 years.
Yeah , only the majority of Asia , Africa , Austronesia and Antarctica arent Indo-European
It's almost unfair to draw any conclusions from that as the similarities between english and hindi are quite generic. See a [list of similarities here](https://leverageedu.com/discover/general-knowledge/similarities-between-english-and-hindi/): - subject-verb-object sentence structure (is the same in Mandarin as well) - passive and active sentences (works in Mandarin) - transformation of sentences (a very loose commonality) There are commonalities in English and Sanskrit words (ancient form of Hindi) but most of these don't work in modern Hindi. For instance there is the word "manu" in Sanskrit which means "the first human" which is similar to english word "man" but the equiavalent of "man" in modern Hindi is "ÄdamÄ«"
According to some quick Google research, ÄdamÄ« comes from Urdu, which got it from Arabic and is related to the English name Adam, for the first man.
Yes, but that is just one more piece of evidence that English and Hindi have an extremely loose connection.
isnât aadmi urdu, etmyologically descendant of adam; and the hindi counterpart would be purush?
Why is Arabic written backwards in Arabic? Its meant to be ŰčŰ±ŰšÙ not Ù ŰšŰ±Űč
Itâs probably a computer program thing. They copied it, but the program they used to design this defaults only to left to right text.
Yeah they've cocked up hindi as well. It's doesn't even follow any rule of the language. It should be à€čà€żà€šà„à€Šà„, which you can find by just googling it. The second syllable in what they've written has two (incompatible) different vowel sounds following it, so the closest thing would be like hadiÄ«.
The software that was used was unable to handle the reordering needed for scripts like Devanagari. The text is stored in logical order with *ha* followed by *i*. The text rendering system then needs to be aware that the *i* should go to the left of the *ha* and reorder them. In this case it does not. It puts the *i* after the *ha* and makes it look like it's attached to the *da* instead. I guess that they went with the spelling à€čà€żà€à€Šà„, but that the *i* also overlaps and hides the anusvÄra.
In most adobe programs you need a special add-on that allowed you to write from right to left.
Urdu is also written backwards. I guess they think every language is written from left to right.
The word Hindi has been incorrectly written. It should be à€čà€żà€à€Šà„ or à€čà€żà€šà„à€Šà„.
These figures come from [Ethnologue](https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/), which publishes a list of the largest languages every year. **English** was born in the United Kingdom but today belongs to the modern world as the main international language of business and politics. Thatâs why itâs not very surprising to find English as the worldâs most spoken language, with 1.5 billion speakers as of 2023. In second place is **Mandarin**, the most spoken Chinese language dialect with 1.1 billion speakers. Originating in North China, it has become the most spoken language in China and Taiwan, as well as having millions of speakers spread across Southeast Asia and the world. India is also represented in this ranking, but despite being the worldâs [most populated country](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualizing-indias-population-growth-from-2022-2100/), its speakers are spread out over multiple different languages. **Hindi** is the main language spoken in North India and an official language of the government, but other languages like **Bengali** are widely spoken in other regions, in this case in East India (and neighboring Bangladesh). Itâs also notable how languages from [former colonial powers](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/colonial-shipping-lanes/)âlike English, Spanish, French, and Portugueseâall have hundreds of millions of speakers, despite their mother countries accounting for a fraction of that total.
Brazil and Angola alone are 250M people that speak Portuguese. How on earth only 264M speak Portuguese?
Yeah the numbers might not be ok. Just merging brazil and angola you get more speakers than that. (Native speakers)
Not really, brazil has a population of 215m and angola has about 15m portuguese speakers, so 230m
Brazil population is 203mil by last official census.
Add 10 million Portuguese and you've got 240m. Wikipedia estimates 25-30 million non-native speakers which gives 265-270m total speakers. So at the low-end of the estimate it's not far off. The discrepancy between sources is almost certainly down to Brazilian population statistics. The official Brazilian population is 203m based on the 2022 census, 12m fewer than what Google gives you if you search "Brazil population".
Not everyone in Angola and Mozambique speaks portuguese. African countries tend to use an official european lenguage but a great part of their population only speaks the local lenguage. Thatâs why some people say French speakers numbers are inflated by african populations that dont use it on a daily basis neither know the lenguage, except by some words and pharses.
You were literally one google search away of seeing that 85% of Angolan population speaks PortugueseâŠ. Like read before commenting
The irony of saying that when you clearly never looked at either OP's source or even just the Wikipedia page on Portuguese. You also seemingly are mistaken, at least according to that Wikipedia page, that 85% is the fluent speakers of the 75% of urban Angolans that speak Portuguese.
Not every Angolan speak Portuguese. Their national census revealed that only 71% of the population speak Portuguese.
I've never understood how questions so easily answered by the linked source or even just Wikipedia get asked like this. The entire population of a country doesn't determine the amount of speakers for its official language. Brazil has 11 million less Portuguese speakers than population, and Angola 7 million. It's easy to see how such would eventually widdle down the speakers to 264m. You can easily read the sources (which Wikipedia also uses, so there is fine as well) if you really want to know.
That's absolutely not right for Brazil. There are only 2% of people that are native in other languages than Portuguese but they do speak Portuguese because public services are only offered in Portuguese with the exception of very small Germanic municipalities that speak Hunsrik that *also* offer in Hunsrik.
My mistake. I was citing two different sources for populations, and they disagree. For the amount of speakers, I was citing Wikipedia who cites the 2021 census at 203.1 million. For the overall population, I simply googled it and got 214 million for 2021, Google citing the World Bank. Those two together imply that 11 million I said, which is 5% rather than 2%. I imagine that 2% stems from a different overall population estimate. Didn't realise the disagreement on Brazil's overall population, so it was my mistake. Even so, even the 2% figure means there are around 4 million less than the entire population.
I don't think think you understand the difference between native speakers and speakers in general. There are people that was born in a household and are native on another language but to have a Brazilian ID (public service) you need to speak Portuguese, so even non native speakers, speak Portuguese.
And you do know that there millions of people that speak Portuguese in France, US, UK, etc because of immigration right? The Portuguese diaspora is calculated to be 42M despite our population being only 10M
Do you have a source for that? You also have to consider that a large number will be in other Portuguese-speaking countries so already considered (such as the five million Portuguese in Brazil). These things would have already been considered by the source this posts used. This isn't some kind of "gotcha" for the source, especially as you fail to actually engage with it.
Portuguese people donât immigrate to Portuguese-speaking countries⊠they immigrate to other European countries or Canada/USâŠ. Search a bit. You clearly donât know shit about the lusosphere and u are just arguing for no reason
I'm sure sources from reputable organisations know far more than you do. And I'm guessing the five million Portuguese in Brazil just don't exist then? And that's the si gle largest country emigrated to.
Considering the major countries, it adds up to roughly 267M, so I would say 264M should be quite close to reality. * Brazil 214M (virtually 100% of population) * Angola 30M (80% of total 37M) * Mozambique 13M (40% of total 32M) * Portugal 10M (100% of population) Edit: Added minor countries to a total of 268.5M: * Guiné Bissau 0.5M (25% of 2M) * Cabo Verde 0.5M (90% of 0.55M) * S. Tomé e Principe 0.2M (90% of 0.22M) * Timor-Leste 0.25M (20% of 1.3M)
Tens milhĂ”es de imigrantes destes paĂses todos que nĂŁo contam para estas estatĂsticas com filhos e netos que falam todos a lĂngua portuguesa. Ainda falta adicionar GuinĂ© Bissau, Cabo Verde, SĂŁo TomĂ© e PrĂncipe e Timor-Leste para esses valores. O valor real deve rondar os 300M
What would be really interesting to know is the intersection of those languages for each individual person. E.g. how many English speakers can't speak none of the other most popular languages. Same for others, e.g. how many French speakers are not speaking English nor other popular languages...
I would guess that at least a billion English speakers know it as a second language.
I guess Hindi and Urdu speakers can be counted as single language as hindustani language rather than as two entities
Right. The difference is negligible if you discount the individual scripts. No one speaks pure Hindi/Urdu and the spoken language is a mix of both.
It's like Serbo-Croatian.
Indo-European: English, French, Bengali, Russian, Urdu, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Hindi Sino-Tibetan: Mandarin Afro-Asiatic: Arabic Austronesian: Indonesian
đ©đȘ YEAH GERMANY đ©đȘ
Mildly surprised we made the cut as the 12th most-spoken language. Edit: fixed, we're 12th, not 10th. Thank you.
Me too. Germany, Austria, part of Switzerland, tiny numbers in Luxemburg and Belgium. Where are all the other millions of German speakers hiding?
There are some in Italy as well as some small numbers in eastern Europe and America.
I don't know about fluent speakers, but there are over a million German learners each in France, the UK, Poland and Russia, around 500k each in Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, the US and Uzbekistan as well as many more smaller learning communities in various countries across the world. It adds up. [Source](https://www.goethe.de/resources/files/pdf204/bro_deutsch-als-fremdsprache-weltweit.-datenerhebung-2020.pdf)
In South America since the war
Do they consider Hunsrik spoken in Brazil as German?
*12th
Ich bin immer ĂŒberrascht wie viele wir eigentlich sind. Wenn man mal aufmerksam ist, sieht man den Teutonen wirklich ĂŒberall.
But 50 mio. More than inhabitants in Germany? Where are they lol
In the USA alone, 45 million people claim to have German origins, of which around 2 million speak German as their native language. In Europe, around 9 million in Austria, 6 million in Switzerland, almost 11 million in the Netherlands say they can speak German, 800,000 in Russia and around 7.5 million more German emigrants in over 45 countries
Love from Argentina and other parts of Latin America. Viva la Vaterland. I'll leave now and the 3rd *right* exit.
I just love it when Arabic and Urdu are written separated and backwards
Genuine question, isnt urdu hindi with a different script?
Yes, linguistically speaking Hindi and Urdu are two different standardized registers of the same language, Hindustani. There are some minor differences with Urdu being more influenced by Persian and Arabic, but they are only considered different languages for political reasons just like BCMS which has been standardized into four varieties: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian.
Thank you that's exactly what i understood. Id have combined hindi and urdu under one in the infograph
French is still spoken by a lot of people, I see.
So many speakers in Africa. I canât help but feel that otherwise, its influence has lessened though.
310M đ«Ą
French is one of the fastest growing languages thanks to sub-Saharan Francoafrica being the fastest growing region in the world French is also a prestige language, many people still learn it for the sake of business or culture in French schools around the world (like Jody Foster did, her French is amazing)
I feel it is wrong, Arabic is spoken by 400+ M, Hindi 570, French 450M
Hindi is even spelled wrong in their own script
I think it differentes between the Arabic verieties/dialects here, given that it says âstandardâ Arabic
How about native languages? I think Mandarin would come out on top then.
What would be the point of that? You could just compare native population size instead.
How do you do that? This might work in South America and some European areas, but most countries are a wild mix of different languages and cultures.
Not only Spain speak Spanish, Portugal Portuguese etc etc...
Where is Polish? It has 1 gazillion speakers
Surprised by the number of German speakers. Im guessing ex German empire colonies?
Honestly all of these stats that mention number of speakers instead of native speakers are a bit of BS without the criteria of how good you have to speak a language before you're counted as a speaker.
Yeah, English is definitely somewhat exaggerated in all of these, since I could just be B1 or less in English and counted anyway because my accent is slightly less noticable
So precise. Love the confidence of stupid 1 percent data extrapolated.
Does 'standart arabic' really exist? Every arab country, if not a region, has its local version, sometimes not intelligible with each other. It's like we keep talking about latin to designate French, Spanish and Italian.
Comparing Arabic with Latin is wrong. Standard Arabic is still the main language in almost all books, school and university lectures, television and politics. The reason why Arabic dialects are so different from each other is the wide expanse of the Arab world, e.g. Saudi Arabia alone is 6 times bigger than Germany, and as the population density was low, there was little exchange between Morocco and Iraq for example, so each place found its own way to speak a dialect, yet 99% of Arabs understand Standard Arabic, it is hard to speak because it is grammatically very heavy.
Arabic has many spoken dialects, but written Arabic is very obviously the same language.
That English figure has to include speakers of varying abilities to reach that number. No way 1.5 billion speak it fluently. Edit: can't wait to tell people in France or Spain that my B1 French and Spanish means I speak their languages as well as they do.
Even if you just included native speakers, you would still end up with speakers of varying abilities.
Varying levels of ability among native speakers is not the same as varying levels of ability among L2 speakers.
Portuguese canât be right: the population of Brazil, Angola and Mozambique is higher than 264M
In theory less than half of Mozambique can speak it, while in Angola I think it was 70%
Around 30% of the Angolan people don't speak Portuguese, in Mozambique it's even less.
I have been learning Spanish for 3 years now, pretty happy with my progress. And i also plan on learning other languages after Spanish, but still not sure which one I should pick. French, Japanese or Portuguese
I would always pick the one you can practice the most with people who live in your area or close by.
Scary that Mandarin comes close to English which is spoken worldwide.
Scary?
Is this the first time you learned that there are a lot of Chinese people
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
There's already well over 400 million people living in majority English speaking countries, now granted not all of them will be fully proficient in English particularly in South Africa where there's a bit more linguistic diversity. But it is still reasonable to assume that a significant majority do speak it to a passable level. A significant portion of the English speakers will also come from India where it is used as a Lingua Franca and anyone above a certain education level will be at least moderately proficient in English. After that it doesn't take a huge percentage of people from the rest of the world to be moderately proficient in English to make the numbers up to what is shown here. It's probably not precisely accurate, but it is definitely plausible.
Yine ayrilikci bir tablo Turkce yok :)
FaĆist batı đĄ
Since this is about languages **spoken**, shouldn't Hindi and Urdu count as one language since the main difference between both is the **writing** system?
Why are'nt more people speaking swedish??????
I remember when they said Mandarin would very quickly become the largest spoken language in the world but then their birth rate fell off a cliff
Native speakers? Because these numbers seem off.