On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:28:11 +0100, Thomas R. Koll tomk32@gmx.de wrote:
About language statistics: http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm
This site has some good data. These bits seem to be the most useful to us:
if you add the secondary speaker populations to the primary speaker populations, you get the following (and I believe more accurate) list: (number of speakers in parentheses)
1. *Mandarin Chinese* (1.12 billion) 2. *English* (480 million) 3. *Spanish* (320 million) 4. *Russian* (285 million) 5. *French* (265 million) 6. *Hindi/Urdu *(250 million) 7. *Arabic* (221 million) 8. *Portuguese* (188 million) 9. *Bengali* (185 million) 10. *Japanese* (133 million) 11. *German* (109 million)
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):
1. *English* (115) 2. *French* (35) 3. *Arabic* (24) 4. *Spanish* (20) 5. *Russian* (16) 6. *German* (9) 7. *Mandarin* (5) 8. *Portuguese* (5) 9. *Hindi/Urdu *(2) 10. *Bengali* (1) 11. *Japanese* (1)
After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige), Weber compiled the following list of the world's ten most influential languages: (number of points given in parentheses)
1. *English *(37) 2. *French* (23) 3. *Spanish* (20) 4. *Russian* (16) 5. *Arabic* (14) 6. *Chinese* (13) 7. *German* (12) 8. *Japanese* (10) 9. *Portuguese* (10) 10. *Hindi/Urdu* (9)