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Fact is that most Chinese do not speak English, as I have experienced first hand. In fact 30% of the Chinese do not have Mandrin (including local dialects) as their first language: see this list of languages spoken in China. English is now taught at highschool, but not all Chinese do attend highschool. I have noticed that they are usually beter at reading the language than speaking it. I have met Chinese who published scientific papers in English, but could not keep a normal conversation.

The decimal points imply you know it with kind of accuracy, where in fact nobody does. 1 Billion is definitely on the low end of estimates. A 10 year old study puts the number of L2 speakers at 1.5 Billion, and some higher estimates think the number is over 2 Billion.

The low estimates tend to rely on old statistics and look at stuff like population growth, which ignores the effect of cultural influences like the internet. For comparison the number of internet users has more than quadrupled since 2003, a time when most connections were also too slow for video. Of course a lot of this growth is from China though.

The way you worded your post implies that English was recently ahead of Chinese. I don't know if that was the case. But one thing most experts agree on is that English is rapidly growing

Sign language is a full language just as any spoken language is, and so learning sign language is exactly like learning a foreign language. Are you sure you taught your children sign language and not just some hand signals?

Oh sure.. just let me go out and learn all 6900+ living languages - then you can publish in whichever language you want...

Alternatively, everyone could learn the same second language and publish in that. Which one of the options do you think makes more sense...?

No, you are wrong. It is Germanic. If you need something better then Wikipedia feel free to follow wiki's sources as these articles seem to be well sourced.

The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with approximately 300–400 million

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian and Old Saxon dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.[28] Up to that point, in Roman Britain the native population is assumed to have spoken the Celtic language Brythonic alongside the acrolectal influence of Latin, from the 400-year Roman occupation.[29]

Lexical similarity: 60% with German, 27% with French, 24% with Russian.

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng

Well, and don't even get me started with the Chinese

Still, more than 417,000,000 people (as of 1999) will find it a little funny to hear about their smartfphone having WebOs.

The difference is sending a GET request to some URL is something we are supposed to do even without asking. This is a link. How are you supposed to know if you can legally click it? Do you check with the domain owner of every link to see if you have permission before you click it?

The difference between a GET request and a malformed packet/running code on other's servers is that the GET is a legal, safe action that everyone on the web does hundreds of times per day.

It’s actually not me claiming that. It’s the German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya#Die_Maya_heute
I basically just quoted the first sentence of that section.
Which itself does have the information from here: http://www.ethnologue.com/15/show_family.asp?subid=90711
The links an square brackets contain the population counts.

Where do you have your numbers from?

In English (and most languages with origins in Latin)

English is Germanic, not Latinate. The large number of English words with Latinate etymology comes from the Norman invasion (French really is latinate) and the centuries-long role of Latin as the academic lingua-franca.

when we want to talk about something that didn't happen, or isn't true, we use the subjunctive case

Subjunctive is a mood.

If you are okay with the combining of the subjective and subjunctive case

Again, subjunctive is a mood, so I'm not sure what you mean. Subjunctive clauses can still have subjects ("that" in the sentence in question) in English. And now for my main point:

However, in modern society, the use of this important standard has all but vanished

If it were so important, would it have all but vanished*? When a grammatical form drops out of a language, usually it is because the communicative work of that form has been "taken over" by other forms and conventions.

Finally, pushing people to follow dead rules (especially when you yourself don't understand the grammatical principles behind the rules) doesn't work, as often people end up learning the "wrong" form. For example, I often see people in written comments using "whom" not as the object case variant of "who" (which it has been historically) but a sentential complementizer for dependent clauses whose subjects are people. Presumably, these people were told to use "whom," and latched onto the most prominent regularity still in the language they could for deciding when to use "who" and when to use "whom."

Trying to force people to use these dead "rules" accomplishes little more than stroking your ego, cultivating a vague anxiety when using certain criticized forms, and enforcing a reputation of Linguistics as not the science of language but the practice of insulting people about their language. Please stop.

* yes, I know this sentence uses the subjunctive mood. The subjunctive mood is not totally dead.

Also spoken in Afghanistan, Australia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Turkey (Asia), USA, Uzbekistan.

Teach everyone Globish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish, a language already spoken, and you are done. Doesn't take much to speak from a 1500 word dictionary instead of the 175,000+ word Oxford dictionary.

No need to delay projects for the required 6912 translations (languages in existence: http://www.ethnologue.com/ because one word was changed in the UI. You need at worst 6912 translaters and at best 1 (who speaks all 6912 languages in existence today).

Globish is already out there, the lingua franca of globalization. Hi Y'All doesn't quite work when buying lumber in Papua New Guinea. A one-time translation of the 1500 words will last humankind for ever, unless physicists make up their mind how many dimensions there are in string theory and bring about contact with other civilizations.

Cuil has only just opened. Already, it is pretty decent.

I don't know, the algorithm seems to be rather bad. They surely have indexed a decent amount of pages, but extracting relevant information seems to be done rather badly. E.g.: if you search for a language, whose name is also a place name or something, and put the name - say "Rwanda" a Bantu language - in the search field and then add "language", because you are interested in the language and not the country. Google ranks the results with a closer syntactic (or semantic?) connection between "Rwanda" and "language" higher, which gives you information about the language Rwanda or at least languages in Rwanda, while the results from cuil are not decent, to say the least. The first page has no result about the language Rwanda, only rather random pages somewhat connected to the country Rwanda. So it seems that cuil does a rather bad job in retrieving the relevant information from an indexed page.

I for one would love to have options to Google.

Yes, agreed, very much.

Just a little note: English is just a Romance as German. I'd say that German is less alien to English than all the other languages you have mentioned. We have lots of words in common and we even have an accent which incorporates parts of the English language (which is called "platt").

Nevertheless I agree that French among others is still easier to learn because the grammar is more consistent and there are less exceptions. It's also easier because the word itself reveals its gender and there are only two to keep in mind...

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.
English and German (along with Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, etc) are Germanic languages. The Romance laguages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc) are Romance languages. Both are Indo-European, but they are separate families.
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90017

No.

There are a lot. It's not even one family. Really a lot! (Every red dot a language.)

What is probably meant: It's an African concept. This notion is not restricted to one language/speech community and in that sense (sub-Sahara) African.

I personally know and talk a language that is going extinct (mix of Venetian, German and Slav and it is VERY old.) and would definitely NOT want a corporate entity fubaring it even more and faster.

I hope you'd want the language documented though so it can survive. That's what groups like Ethnologue are trying to do, document and record languages so they will survive. More than 4000 languages are threatened with extinction.

Microsoft, but this one strikes me as more than a bit stupid. By making their software available in more languages, Microsoft is performing a service. They can choose not to buy it if they don't want it. It's not like native speakers of other languages will be lining up to purchase Office in some obscure language like this.

Same here, I bash MS myself, but in this case I support MS in translating Windows to Mapuzugun. If only MS would do it for more languages. More than 4000 languages, bet most people don't even realize there are that many, are endangered or threatened with extinction.

Check http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IQ

most of Africa's problems have been the fall out of British colonialism.

Africa's problems weren't caused by the fall British colonialism, more like they were caused by European colonization. And not just British, the Dutch, France, Germany, and Italy all had colonized Africa. Once they did they created "nations" with a number of different ethnic groups living in them but afterwards most countries were left with just one ethnic group controlling the nation. Take Nigeria, there are something like a hundred different ethnic groups in Nigeria yet a small number of groups controls Nigeria and benefits from the oil. The same with Niger. A look through the Ethnologue country index Languages of Africa can give you an idea of how many different ethnic groups there are. And the way things are one ethnic group can have communities living in more than one country.

They don't speak Russian in Ukraine anymore.

There are about 11 million Ukrainians who speak Russian, out of 47 million.

Indix, a localized GNU/Linux, is already available in Malayalam, the principal language of Kerala, so they're in good shape on that score.

You shouldn't get the idea that these Indian texts are in "rare" languages. Hindi has 180 million first language speakers, plus 120 million second language speakers. Sanskrit has only a few first language speakers but about 200,000 speakers total, and many more people can read it. (Sanskrit is, roughly speaking, the Indian equivalent of Latin.) Tamil has some 66 million speakers. These languages are not all that well known in North America and Europe, but there is no shortage of people who understand them.

You shouldn't get the idea that these Indian texts are in "rare" languages. Hindi has 180 million first language speakers, plus 120 million second language speakers. Sanskrit has only a few first language speakers but about 200,000 speakers total, and many more people can read it. (Sanskrit is, roughly speaking, the Indian equivalent of Latin.) Tamil has some 66 million speakers. These languages are not all that well known in North America and Europe, but there is no shortage of people who understand them.

You shouldn't get the idea that these Indian texts are in "rare" languages. Hindi has 180 million first language speakers, plus 120 million second language speakers. Sanskrit has only a few first language speakers but about 200,000 speakers total, and many more people can read it. (Sanskrit is, roughly speaking, the Indian equivalent of Latin.) Tamil has some 66 million speakers. These languages are not all that well known in North America and Europe, but there is no shortage of people who understand them.

Think Indian, Pakistan, Mixed(*), Black Carribean(**), Black African(**) and Bangladeshi and you'll get to about 83% of Britain's ethnic minorities. Only then will you get to any of the listed languages, Chinese, who make up about 5%.

* Yeah, we don't know about the 15% who are classified as 'mixed'. It's probably safe to assume that that they are predominantly white mixed with all of the above minorities in approximate proportion to the percentage that each particular minority comprises.

** Black Carribean and Black African doesn't say anything about language. French, Dutch and Spanish probably all feature to some degree.

Source: http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/f acts/index39.aspx

An even better resource would be the Ethnologue. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=GB concurs - Russian, Arabic and Chinese just don't feature strongly. Spanish isn't even listed, and French is only mentioned because it is the first language in the Channel Islands which are part of the UK.

The reason for the choice is purely to cover as much of the World's educated population as possible. Nearly everyone in Europe reads English, French, or Spanish with a good degree of competancy. Any educated Indian reads English. Ditto for former Soviet states with Russian. Educated Africans according to previous colonial powers. Ditto South America and much of Southeast Asia. Japanese will read English due to the legacy of post WWII reconstruction. Australasia use English as their first language. That leaves China and the Middle East as the two big population centers that aren't well covered by the previous languages.

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=PG

Does anyone know what's up with that?

Flamebait, sure, I'll bite...

English and French did not evolve from a common parent.

I understand why you posted anonymously...

How would you explain the obvoius similarities in the basic numbers from English and French (and a lot of other European languages?) You don't think English had words for 1, 2 and 3 before they required it via French in 1066 or perhaps from the Danes around 850 AD?

Of course English and French evolved from the same common parent. Just as most other European languages did... Surprise, surprise, the Indo-European language family! Here's the linguistic lineage for French and English.

... written history trumps linguistic theories (well understood or not) any day of the week.

In what respect? That's like saying "leather belts are better than oranges"... If you don't define a context for your comparison it's pretty useless. Besides, written history might include linguistic data as well.

Flamebait, sure, I'll bite...

English and French did not evolve from a common parent.

I understand why you posted anonymously...

How would you explain the obvoius similarities in the basic numbers from English and French (and a lot of other European languages?) You don't think English had words for 1, 2 and 3 before they required it via French in 1066 or perhaps from the Danes around 850 AD?

Of course English and French evolved from the same common parent. Just as most other European languages did... Surprise, surprise, the Indo-European language family! Here's the linguistic lineage for French and English.

... written history trumps linguistic theories (well understood or not) any day of the week.

In what respect? That's like saying "leather belts are better than oranges"... If you don't define a context for your comparison it's pretty useless. Besides, written history might include linguistic data as well.

Flamebait, sure, I'll bite...

English and French did not evolve from a common parent.

I understand why you posted anonymously...

How would you explain the obvoius similarities in the basic numbers from English and French (and a lot of other European languages?) You don't think English had words for 1, 2 and 3 before they required it via French in 1066 or perhaps from the Danes around 850 AD?

Of course English and French evolved from the same common parent. Just as most other European languages did... Surprise, surprise, the Indo-European language family! Here's the linguistic lineage for French and English.

... written history trumps linguistic theories (well understood or not) any day of the week.

In what respect? That's like saying "leather belts are better than oranges"... If you don't define a context for your comparison it's pretty useless. Besides, written history might include linguistic data as well.

Both names can be used but Western Farsi, as spoken in Iran differs slightly from Eastern Farsi, as spoken in Afghanistan. In general, I think if you want to differentiate, use the word "Persian" for Iranian Farsi and "Farsi" for Afghani Farsi. Both use the Arabic script, albeit with 4 extra letters, so you'd have to know the script as well as the language.

Both names can be used but Western Farsi, as spoken in Iran differs slightly from Eastern Farsi, as spoken in Afghanistan. In general, I think if you want to differentiate, use the word "Persian" for Iranian Farsi and "Farsi" for Afghani Farsi. Both use the Arabic script, albeit with 4 extra letters, so you'd have to know the script as well as the language.

There is also http://www.ethnologue.com/, which keeps track of over 6000 human languages.

> Academics care about linguistic diversity in an abstract sense, but normal people really don't.

I think you're a bit wrong on this. There are around 6,800 languages. Most languages have developed their own culture. Do you really think millions of people around the globe would be willing to lose their identity?

For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbeks started replacing Russian loan-words with the original Uzbek words.

Paul Rodrigues

http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/help/top-100-language s-by-population.html http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=S WA

Only about 5 million first language speakers, 30 million bilinguals, so its not even in the top 100.

After all, Gentoo is an alternative (deprecated) name for the Telugu. language.

You rock. As a language nerd, I appreciate your contribution :)

However, Ethnologue lists 48(!) Romance/Italic languages. A quick check found that these also have over a million speakers each:

• Galician (Spain, 3M)
• Emiliano (Italy, 3M)
• Ligurian (Italy, 1.8M)
• Lombardo (Italy, 8M - even more than Catalan)
• Napoletano (Italy, 7M - ditto)
• Piemontese (Italy, 3M)
• Sardinian (Italy, 1.5M)
• Sicilian (Italy, 4M)
• Veneto (Italy, 2M)
• France has Alsatian - in the Germanic family - at 1.5M and several other Romance languages I couldn't find numbers for.

As an American, I find that simply amazing. Sure, a US Midwesterner and an Aussie are gonna have some vocabulary issues, but it's very much the same language. Imagine speaking one language in your state/province, but another (related one) to relate to the rest of your country. The Germanic-speaking portions of Europe are like this too.

Back on topic, sort of. One theory is that it's U2's fourteenth album. Or we can just assume Bono is dumb. :)

first paragraph on the page, then a huge breakdown of all the various languages there:

Republic of India, Bharat. National or official languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, English (Associate Official). 1,000,000,000 (1999 IMA). 7% classified as tribals. Indo-Aryan languages: 491,087,116, 74.24%, Dravidian languages: 157,836,723, 23.86%, Austro-Asiatic languages 7,705,011, 1.16%, Tibeto-Burman languages 4,071,701, .62% (1987 Mahapatra). 15 national languages. 1,683 'mother tongues' (official figure). An estimated 850 languages in daily use (Todd and Hancock 1986). Literacy rate 36% to 52%. Also includes Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Armenian 560, Burushaski, Western Farsi 18,000, Geman Deng, Lisu 1,000, Northern Pashto 15,000, Portuguese 250,000, Russian 1,036, Thami, Chitwania Tharu, Kathoriya Tharu, Uyghur, Walungge, Arabic, Chinese. Information mainly from G. Marrison 1967; R. Hugoniot 1970; C. Masica 1991; K.S. Singh 1994, 1995; J. Matisoff et al. 1996; R. Breton 1997; R. Burling ms. (1999). Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, traditional religion, Buddhist. Blind population 9,000,000. Deaf population 1,500,000 to 55,773,718 (1998). Deaf institutions: 149. Data accuracy estimate: B, C. The number of languages listed for India is 398. Of those, 387 are living languages and 11 are extinct. Diversity index 0.93.

Talk to people who use customer service-it's very difficult to engage in coversations and be understood adequately, both ways, more often than not. Close but no cigar is still "no cigar". There's a rather large difference between the english dialect used in India and United States styled dialects. It is such a big difference there's still a language problem.

I believe there are many areas in Brazil where they do not speak Portuguese. If Wikipedia wasn't currently offline, you could read more there. This site says that only 158,000,000* (out of 165,851,000*) people in Brazil speak Portuguese. "There are also more than 100 indigenous languages." With Portugal only having 10,102,022 people, the total from these 2 countries is just under 170,000,000. What other major populations speak Portuguese? (Most of my world-languages geography knowledge has atrophied.) The data in the list may not be so out-of-date after all.

* 1998 - United Nations

...they are just written in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, or Urdu languages

Not at all. In fact, Asia has more languages than Africa; though the distinction that page makes between "Asia" and "Pacific" is kind of sketchy, since Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are in different categories despite sharing an island...

Your response depends on a particular interpretation of the term "Chinese Languages". Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Gan are examples of dialects of Chinese, which can all be written with the same character set because the grammar and vocabulary are nearly identical.

But if you read "Chinese languages" as "languages spoken in China", things get interesting. Uighur, Evenki, Bouyei, and Tibetan are all non-Chinese languages spoken mainly in China, which can't even remotely be written with the Chinese character set.

An earlier poster posted about political obstacles to Microsoft localizing their software in minority languages in certain countries, giving Catalunya in Spain as his example. M$ did ultimately produce a Catalan version of their software, because the existence of a good OpenOffice.org Catalan localization, and also in part, I would argue, because, there are limits to how much Spain, a Western, democratic country, can do to prevent something like this.

Compare that to China, however, which has shown the willingness to ban Disney in its entirety if Disney went ahead with plans to broadcast a documentary on Tibet that mentioned that a lot of Tibetans aren't completely happy with the arrangement they have with the Chinese (which arrangement could be described as "AYBABTU"). If Microsoft developers were seen trying to work with Tibetans to make something that would promote Tibetan interests by helping them communicate in their own language (and they might think it worthwhile, with more than 1 million speakers and potential users), China would have a shitfit and take some serious action against Microsoft.

Here's the Ethnologue entry for
Farsi and its position
in the family tree. The Ethnologue is the best
single source for reliable information about where
languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.

Here's the Ethnologue entry for
Farsi and its position
in the family tree. The Ethnologue is the best
single source for reliable information about where
languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.

Here's the Ethnologue entry for
Farsi and its position
in the family tree. The Ethnologue is the best
single source for reliable information about where
languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.

And Bantu's an entire language family, with over 500 languages belonging to it, not counting dialects. Minor, indeed.

And Bantu's an entire language family, with over 500 languages belonging to it, not counting dialects. Minor, indeed.

I was specifically talking about native speakers, where the answer is most certainly no. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=E NG gives the totaly number of native English speakers as 341 million as of 1999. It's safe to say that the US, with a population of 290 million, contains a comfortable majority of those. That same site gives the total population of English speakers, native and non-native, at 508 million, and I think the US gets a majority even there.

We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes (usable according to their terms) for every language as part of the Ethnologue project, including artificial languages and sign languages.

As for country codes, I'm sure we can make something up. Just ask the leader of each country what they'd like for us to use for their country, work out the collisions, and compile our own standard (and issue an RFC).

We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes (usable according to their terms) for every language as part of the Ethnologue project, including artificial languages and sign languages.

As for country codes, I'm sure we can make something up. Just ask the leader of each country what they'd like for us to use for their country, work out the collisions, and compile our own standard (and issue an RFC).

We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes (usable according to their terms) for every language as part of the Ethnologue project, including artificial languages and sign languages.

As for country codes, I'm sure we can make something up. Just ask the leader of each country what they'd like for us to use for their country, work out the collisions, and compile our own standard (and issue an RFC).

We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes (usable according to their terms) for every language as part of the Ethnologue project, including artificial languages and sign languages.

As for country codes, I'm sure we can make something up. Just ask the leader of each country what they'd like for us to use for their country, work out the collisions, and compile our own standard (and issue an RFC).