"Used" is an inaccurate description here. Japanese, for example, is "used" in the US, Brazil, Korea, Australia, New Zealand...
What we are talking about here is "official status". For most European countries, official status of a language means it is actually widely spoken by the population. But for most African countries, it is simply the language of the former colonial overlords. In some cases it is widely spoken, in others it is not.
Most of the misleading official status goes to English, French, and Portuguese. Russian also has some measure of this but it's at least spoken by a minority in all the independent nations where it's official.
Mark
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:56:43 -0800, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Michael Becker wrote:
The following is a list of these languages in terms of the number of countries where each is spoken. The number that follows is the total number of countries that use that language (from Weber, 1997):
- *English* (115)
- *French* (35)
- *Arabic* (24)
- *Spanish* (20)
- *Russian* (16)
- *German* (9)
- *Mandarin* (5)
- *Portuguese* (5)
- *Hindi/Urdu *(2)
- *Bengali* (1)
- *Japanese* (1)
Portuguese is spoken in seven countries: Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé, Angola, and Mozambique. I don't know if it's still being used in East Timor.
Bengali is used in two countries: India and Bangladesh.
Ec
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