Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers/Archive 3

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immigrant languages Australia

This site lists the following immigrant languages as spoken by 1% and 2% of the Australian population in 2001: Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Mandarin. kwami 10:56, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Mandarin is spoken by 0.8%. DHN 14:32, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
Oops! though since we've lumped all Chinese together, I haven't repeated that error on the main page. kwami

Number of Native Persian-Speakers

The number of native Persian-speakers in Afghanistan is higher than just 40%. The CIA and Ethnologe numbers are just estimates, and most of the estimates are done by people who neither know Afghanistan nor the Afghan people. Persian has always been the lingua franca of Central-Asia. ALL cities in Afghanistan are predominantly Tajik and Persian-speaking:

  • 85-90% of Herat is Persian speaking
  • 70-90% of Kabul is Persian-speaking
  • 70-80% of Mazar is Persian-speaking
  • 75-85% of Ghazni is Persian-speaking
  • and even 25-30% of Qandahar is Persian-speaking

Here is a map I found in a news-paper a while ago: [1]

Even if we assume that only 40% of Afghanistan is native Persian-speaking, Persian remains the major language of communication. There are millions of Pashtuns who are native Persian-speakers, for example the royal families. Zaher Shah, former king of Afghanistan, and the entire Muhammadzai royal family is Persian-speaking. Zaher Shah does not know Pashto although he is an ethnic Pashtun. Up to 90% of Afghanistan knows how to speak Persian, MOST of the Pashtuns know Persian: either they are native speakers or they use it as second language. Besides that, you TOTALLY underestimate the number of Persian-speakers in Usbekistan. According to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and certain studies of the Harvard University, up to 50% of Uzbekistan consists of ethnic Tajiks and native Persian-speakers. Here is the source: Uzbekistan, Ethnic Composition and Discriminations by David Carlson, Harvard University, August 2003

I suggest the following numbers for Persian:

34,689,168 + 33,328,751 (1st + 2nd language speakers in Iran according to CIA)
11,971,595 + 17,957,393 (40% Afghans native Persian-speakers + second language)
1,000,000 in Pakistan (according to Ethnologue)
3,535,000 (Total estimate of Iranian diaspora in US, Turkey, UAE, Iraq, Germany, UK, Canada, France, India, Australia, Syria, Russia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Israel)
3,000,000 (Total estimate of Afghan refugees in Iran, Europe, America, and Asutralia - Pakistan not included; source: CNN, Human Rights Watch)
11,000,000 (Tajiks in Uzbekistan; estimated)
5,723,641 + 1,439,865 (1st + 2nd language speakers in Tajikestan according to CIA)
-----------
Native Total = 70,919,404
Non Native Total = 52,728,009
Grand Total = 123,647,413

I suggest to change the numbers of the article to:

71M native speakers + 53M 2nd language = 124M total -213.39.180.88 01:13, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

You make a good point with Uzbekistan, one that was not adequately discussed when we decided on a figure. However, you seem to be pushing for the highest figures you can find, rather than the most accurate.
Also, please don't delete existing references, especially when you use them for your data.
Unfortunately, newspapers are not reliable sources for data. Carlson's Harvard paper cites a couple other sources, but other than discussing the preponderance of Tajiks in the cities of Buxara and Samarkand, they only say that the Uzbekistan figure of 5% is an underestimate. The number of Tajiks could be much greater, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the number of Tajik speakers is much greater: Carlson's sources explicitly say that many Tajiks are officially counted as Uzbeks because they speak Uzbek as their native tongue. The wiki article demographics section mentions Tajik sources that claim Uzbekistan is 30% ethnically Tajik. Carlson gives an unsupported claim of 40%, and from that you somehow derive 50%. Considering that even nationalist Tajiki sources only claim 30%, forgive me if I have my doubts. Wiki has 15%; what say we take 15-30% and see what happens?
As for all the Afghans who speak Persian as a interlingua, sure - but they were already counted in the estimate for this article. And your map, nice though it is, undermines your claim: you say all Afghan cities have majority Tajik populations, but the map you give as evidence has 26% for Kandahar (including the Hazara) and 7% for Farah. Also, the countryside may well have a Pashtun majority, so there's that.
Reviewing the figures for native speakers,
34,689,168 in Iran according to CIA
11,971,595 = 40% Afghans that speak Dari as main language ?
1,000,000 in Pakistan per according to Ethnologue
3,535,000 Iranian diaspora in per source you deleted
5,723,641 in Tajikestan according to CIA
? 15%-30% of 25,563,441 population of Uzbekistan ?
-----------
Native Total = 60.8-64.6 million ?
This compared to the previous figure of 56-57 million.
Could you dig up some references to support you claim for the numbers in Uzbekistan? Otherwise, I think we should revert to something around 60 million, with the disclaimer that the populations for Afghanistan and Uzbekistan at 40% and 15% are only rough estimates. kwami 05:28, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
1) It is difficult to give any English sources regarding this issue, because the Anglo-Saxon world is not really interested in Tajiks or Tajiks living in Uzbekistan. Carlson's study is one of the very first and very few English views of the subject. Other sources are those of human rights organizations and, most recently, those of EU investigations. The European Union has recently sanctioned Uzbekistan because of this issue (and other crimes against humanity). Some other sources:
  • " ... The formation of Soviet republics in Central Asia has turned out to be a forcible "Uzbekization" for the local Tajiks. During the population census before the national and territorial division in 1924 the number of Tajiks in Bukhara and Samarkand was 75-98 per cent; in the 1926 census the number fell to 15-20 per cent. Therefore, today members of the Tajik diaspora say that the real number of Tajiks living in Uzbekistan is several times higher than official data shows; simply the majority of Tajiks are registered as Uzbeks. According to them, there are nearly 7m Tajiks in Uzbekistan. ..." [2]
2) I suggested to assume 11,000,000 Tajiks (Tajik-speakers) in Uzbekistan. Usbekistan's population is 27-30M. So, 11M is ca. 30% of the population.
It's 43% of the population figure I have. kwami
3) According to official Iranian sources, the number of ethnic Persians in Iran is more than 60%, the CIA estimates only 51%. Maybe we should take something around 54/55% ?! Also: Mazandarani and Gilaki are dialects of Persian. Some consider them distinct but related languages. Others consider them dialects of Persian, comparable to Scottish and English or Swiss German and "normal" German.
4) The number of Iranian Persian-speakers outside of Iran is more than 4M [3]

-213.39.172.219 10:15, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Since there is real uncertainty here, I suggest we put in a range of the best supported figures, as we have for other languages: Perhaps a low end with 15% of Uzbekistan & 50% of Iran, and a high of 30% Uzbekistan & 60% Iran. We might want to figure in a range for Afghanistan as well.
As for Mazandarani and Gilaki, the question we need to ask, to make our decision consistant with the rest of the table, is whether the Mazandarani and Gilaki consider themselves to speak Persian, or if they have a distinct ethno-linguistic identity. Mutual intelligibility isn't really the point: Chinese and Arabic aren't languages by that standard, for example, and Ukrainian would be a dialect of Russian. Do you know the Mazandarani and Gilaki communities in Iran, and how they perceive of themselves? kwami 23:08, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
As far as I know, Mazandaranis and Gilakis consider their languages dialects of Persian. It does not matter anyway, because MOST Mazandaranis speak Persian as their FIRST language, especially the youths and those who have migrated to Tehran or other large cities in Iran. So, the CIA's 8% do not necessairily represent the number of native speakres, but just the estimated number of ethnic Mazandaranis (Mazandaran is a region in northern Iran)

-213.39.220.154 10:54, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

What about Luri and other Iranian languages in Iran? Are only Mazandarani and Gilaki considered Persian?

I'll go ahead and put a range in the Persian entry, and rank it according to the average. I'll use 15-30% of Uzbekistan & 50-60% of Iran - which might include Maz. & Gil. kwami 04:15, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Not Serious

Even among the largest languages, this list looks random at best. German is probably larger than Punjabi and Bengali is almost certainly larger than Portuguese. The Bengali page says it's ranked as number 4, on this page it's number 7. Counting all the Chinese and the Arabic dialects together is questionanble. The difference between some Chinese dialects or some Arabic dialects is larger than between French or Italian. If even the largest and best-known languages are in such a disarray, how could the numbers for the smaller languages be trusted? We should agree on one source and then just stick to that. Preferably, that source should not be Ethnolouge but a more trustworthy one. [anonymous]

Read the discussion above. We've covered this. If you have a more trustworthy source, by all means share it with the rest of us! kwami 21:33, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
I agree that this is not accurate. I must add that this page seems more political than informational. I don't see how Arabic can be equaled to Chinese in its varieties when all arabic satellite stations use one spoken and written Arabic (including commercials). I am yet to meet an Egyptian who says "I speak Egyptian". And if a language called Hassaniya is indeed not the same as Arabic, then it should have its own heading. Arabic language had influenced many languages including Spanish and Persian, so what is so special about Hassaniya? HAE 20:38, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
With most countries that have Arabic as their official language, the language is Modern Standard Arabic. However, the official language of Mauritania is allegedly Hassaniya Arabic, not Modern Standard. I could easily be wrong, but if that is correct, it deserves mention. It doesn't mean that Hassaniya deserves a separate entry, if it's considered to be Arabic.
As for the list being political, of course it is. Language identities are political. 66.75.155.160 18:09, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Bulgarian

Some anon changed Bulgarian from 9M (the Ethnologue estimate from 1986, with 1M outside Bulgaria) to 16M, with no support. Given the negative growth rates in much of eastern Europe, perhaps it should go down instead. The 1986 estimate was Bulgaria plus other countries, most significant being Moldova (68% native speakers out of a 400k Bulgarian population) and Turkey.

For 2005, here's what I come up with:

  • Bulgaria: 84.8% (2001 cencus) of a population of 7.45M (2005 estimate) = 6.318 M.
  • Turkey: 300k (2001 estimate).
  • Moldova: 1.9% of a population of 3.39M (2004 census) = 64k.
  • Greece: 30k (1998).
  • Romania: 8k (2002 census).
  • Serbia: unknown.
Total: 6.720 million, not counting Serbia.

Let's round up to 7 million for Serbia and emigre communities. Anyone have better data? kwami 07:32, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Greek

Some anon changed Greek from 12M to 20M. Since the 12M figure was from 1986, I've checked into it.

Current (2004) non-immigrant population of Greece, 11M, of whiom 90% are native Greek speakers [200k Slav (Macedonian), 200k Pontic, 150k Albanian (Arvanitika), and at least 200k Macedo Romanian (figures go as high as 700k), plus Turkish]. South Cyprus 700k, presumably all Greek speakers. Plus 460k USA, 200k UK, 145k Canada, 105k Oz, 60k Albania, 40k Egypt, 20k Italy, etc. gives us still a total of 12M. So I'm leaving the population as was and changing the date from 1986 to 2004. If anyone has more complete figures, by all means share! kwami 23:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Azeri

The number of Azeri-Turkish is exeggerated! 33 million? The population of Azeri-speaking people in Azerbaijan is ca. 7 million. Where do the other 26 million come from?! Iran?! According to the official census in Iran, the number of Azeris in Iran is ca. 10 million. The CIA estimates ca. 24% of Iran's population (=ca. 16 million). Azeris dominate only 4 provinces of Iran: West + East Azerbaijan, Zanjan and Ardabil. These 4 provinces make up less than 15% of Iran's geographical area and are home to less than 10% of Iran's population [4]. There are approx. another 3 million "ethnic" Azeris in Tehran, of whom at least 1 million are not Azeri-speaking anymore.

The following is taken from the "Ecyclopaedia of the Orient":

(Iranian-)Azerbaijan: Area in northwestern Iran, comprising the 2 provinces of West Azerbaijan with 2,5 million inhabitants and East Azerbaijan with 3,3 million inhabitants, and covering an area of about 100,000 km². Hence Iranian Azerbaijan makes up 10% of the population and 6% of the area of Iran. To the north lies the independent republic of Azerbaijan, formerly a part of the Soviet Union. About 60% of the 17 million Azeris (also called Azerbaijani or Azeri-Turks) of the region live in Iran, and about 7 million in the independent republic. This means that nearly half of Iran's Azeris live outside the Azerbaijan provinces. In both of the Iranian Azerbaijan provinces Azeris dominate, while Kurds and Armenians are important minorities.
-- http://i-cias.com/e.o/azerbaijan.htm

Wikipedia's 33 million are totally exeggerated! Iran's official census + CIA factbook + Encyclopaedia of the Orient say: Azeri-speakers are ~20-25 million. Compared to the number in Wikipedia, it's a difference of 10 million! Even the article Azerbaijani language says that the number of native Azeri-speakers is ca. 20 million -80.171.77.99 00:09, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

It could well be exagerated. However, there are no dates on the Enc. of the Orient figures, the CIA Factbook is unreliable (Did you know the United Kingdom won its independence in 1820?), and the Wikipedia article uses the CIA figures.
Here are the figures from Ethnologue (also not the most reliable source, but the default for this article unless better evidence is available):
North Azeri: 7.1M, mostly in Azerbaijan (6.1M in Azerbaijan in 1989 census)
South Azeri: 24.4M, mostly in Iran (23.5M in Iran in 1997)
Qashqa'i: 1.5M (1997)
I don't know what the Ethnologue sources are, but the numbers have increased somewhat since their 1991 data.
Could you get ahold of the latest Iranian census data? kwami 05:08, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
"Ethnologue" is probably the most unreliable source ever. Where do they get their numbers?! At some point, Ethnologue even claimed that there are "27 Mio Persians and 38.9 Mio Azeris in Iran". It is a Chritian organization supposed to coordinate Chritian missionaries. They have been chriticized many many times. This is what Wikipedia says about "Ethnologue":
  Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International (formerly known as the Summer 
  Institute of Linguistics), a Christian linguistic service organization which studies lesser-known languages primarily 
  to provide the speakers with native language biblical texts. ... The neutrality of Ethnologue as a scientific institution 
  is sometimes disputed, particularly in areas of language classification associated with the Bible and Abrahamic religion.
This is taken from the article SIL International:
  ... SIL has been accused of going against general linguistic community consensus (and contrary to the opinion of the 
  majority of the speakers themselves in some cases) as to what constitutes a separate language (as opposed to a dialect) ...
I do not consider "Ethnologue" any reliable, especially in the case of Iran which is an "Islamic Republic". The most credible source right now is the official Iranian census, which says that the number of Azeris is some 9 Mio in Iran. Iran's government has no reasons to publish fake numbers regarding Azeris, because Iran is being ruled by a powerful Azeri minority. Both, Iran's supreme-leader Sayed Ali Khamenei and the leader of Iran's military, Reza Safawi, are ethnic Azeris. Besides that, many of the most powerful clerics of the country are Azeris. Since the time of the Kizilbash and Safawids, Azeris have been the "back-bone" of the Iranian nation. So, all in one, the Iranian census sounds pretty credible to me. On the other hand, it is no proof that the number is 100% correct - thus, the next "credible" source is the CIA factbook which is based on CIA's secret intelligence. The CIA number (16 Mio) should be considered as the possible "maximum". Ethnologues 24 Mio are totally exeggerated and not convincing.
-80.171.77.99 09:18, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
Well, whether Ethnologue considers Azeri as one language or five doesn't make any difference for our purposes. Nor does their classification, since no one disputes that Azeri is Oghuz Turkic. Their population figures are often wrong, but so are everyone else's. You keep returning to the CIA as "reliable", but any 'factbook' that lists the United States as an older country than Great Britain does not inspire confidence. Their ideas as to what constitutes a language and how they're related are often worse than Ethnologue's.
That's interesting about the role of Azeris in the Iranian govt. I had no idea. Of course, if they're assimilated (native Persian speaking, I mean), then there may well be some pressure to downplay the number of Azeri speakers, to show that the nation is well integrated. Just because someone in the USA is Chicano doesn't mean they support Spanish bilingual education, for example. And often the strongest resistance to restoring Native American languages often comes from Native Americans who are monolingual in English. I'm not claiming that's the case with Azeri, just that it's something to consider.
Can you provide a link to the results of the latest Iranian census? kwami 09:58, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunatly, I cannot find a link to the Iranian census (at least not in English). I cought the number in a news-paper a while ago. As for "reliability", I see no reason for taking Ethnologues numbers as gospels. At least, one should include that the number is disputed, and that estimates differ from 21 Mio to 33 Mio. The language itself should be ranked somewhere in between, maybe at 27 Mio. All I know is that the number 30-40 Mio are pushed by Pan-Turkists. There are absolutely no proofs for this claim. Ethnologues numbers are pure guesses, mostly based on interviews. Or do you think that Ethnologue had a census going on in Iran?! Ethnologues numbers differ every year - according to the political situation. In 1996, Ethnologue guessed the number of Azeris in Iran to be 13 Mio [5], and now, only 9 years later, they claim that the number is 25 Mio. Do you really think that the number of Azeris has increased by 12 Mio (= nearly doubled) in only 9 years?! Other articles of Ethnologue are pure nonesense, for example the "Uzbekistan Report" [6]. It does not even mention the Persian language, although Tajiks are at least 20% of the population. According to studies of the Harvard University, Tajik may be at least 40% of the population. Ethnologue has absolutely no reliability in my eyes.
Here are a few other numbers:
- http://i-cias.com/e.o/iran_4.htm
-80.171.58.21 00:58, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
No, when Ethnologue changes their numbers like that, they're admitting they were wrong. It means that they now have what they believe to be better data. And of course we don't take Ethnologue to be gospel, but it's one of only two sources available for the world's languages. (The other, Vogelin & Vogelin, is out of date.) Since there is nothing else available, we use Ethnologue.
Of course, with individual languages, we can often do better. Persian is a case in point. However, what you remember of a newspaper article is not acceptable as evidence. Even if you had the article at hand, newspapers are notoriously unreliable. Do you have access to the census data in Persian? I'd be happy to use that. But we need something that's verifiable.
The Enc. of the Orient is one guy in Oslo, but I've written him to ask what his sources are. Without anything better to go on, we could give the CIA and Ethnologue figures as a range estimate, but I'd prefer to avoid that. kwami 06:10, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Of course, there are other sources, like the CIA factbook 2005. However, you do not consider the factbook reliable because of one mistake. On the other hand, you ignore the mistakes of Ethnologue. In my eyes, the CIA factbook is deffinitly more reliable than the Ethnologue guesses, which are not based on any scientific works or official numbers. It's only "guesses" by people who do not even know the countries they talk about. In case of Iran, "Ethnologue" does not even have missioanries in the country - so the number is PURE guess, and probably politically motivated. At least you should include the information that estimates vary. Right now, the number written in the article is the "maximum", based on Ethnologue guesses. This CANNOT be Wikipedia standard ... -80.171.58.21 15:02, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

No, the CIA Factbook cannot be a principal source for this article. It only includes a couple dozen languages out of the thousands out there. There is simply nothing to compete with Ethnologue, so it HAS to be Wikipedia standard. That does not mean we can't do better, though, for individual languages. I do not ignore the mistakes of Ethnologue; perhaps you should try reading what I wrote before telling me my opinions. If you can find something better, I'd love to hear about it - Ethnologue's unreliability drives me nuts sometimes. (Their Khoisan classification is worthless, for example.) And the CIA 'Factbook' is chock full of errors, as anyone who's actually looked through it would know. The independence date of the UK is simply a rather egregious example. And Ethnologue of course often relies on official census figures and linguistic surveys when these are available and seem reliable, as you would know if you'd ever bothered to look through it.

I heard back from the Enc. of the Orient, and they say that no one knows how many Azeri speakers there are in Iran, or the number of Persian speakers, for that matter. At least, anyone who does know isn't telling. Their figures "are guesses" (their words), although guesses bases on all available sources. So we have CIA guesses, Ethnologue guesses, and private guesses, but no official figures. Maybe the reason you can't find that census data is because it doesn't exist? Even if official figures do exist, the EO evidently doesn't consider them reliable.

So, according to the EO, we have 18%; the CIA, 24%; Ethnologue, 35%, plus close to a million S. Azeri outside Iran. Out of 67.5M, that amounts to 13M, 17M, or 24M. Add 7M North Azeri, and maybe 1.5M Qashqa'i, and we've got 21-33 million, as you said. I certainly don't object to centering Azeri on that range (I'll do that now), but it would be much better to have something more solid than this. kwami 20:57, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

As you have mentioned in your reply, we only have guesses. Ethnologue guesses, CIA guesses, news-paper guesses, etc - so why should we only pick up one guess, put it above all others and ignore the rest?! Right now, the Ethnologue-guess is the highest number possible, and - quite frankly - it seems illogical. I am not Iranian myself, but I have lived in Iran, and the claim that Azeris are "35%" or "20-30M" in Iran is pure nonsense! It's like claiming that African-American's are "40% of America", only because there are so many African-American musicians and rappers on MTV. The truth is that African-Americans are less than 15% of America's population.
I suggest we take the average of the many guesses we have: 7M Asia Times: "Myth of Azeri oppression in Iran", 12M Encyclopaedia of the Orient, 16M CIA factbook 2005, and 24M Ethnologue (1997).
The average of these numbers is 11.5M. Adding the ~8M native speakers from Azerbaijan to it + 1M native speakers outside Iran and Azerbaijan, it's ~20-21M.
Right now, you are pushing for the highest numbers available ... I do not think that this is Wikipedia standard. "Pushing for highest numbers" was already rejected in the discussion regarding the Persian language. Anyway, the number of Azeri speakers, as it is written right now in the article, has to be edited. The language should be ranked someweher between 20M and 25M, adding the note that that "estimates varry between 15 and 33 million native speakers" -80.171.11.180 22:44, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
AHHHH! You have already edited the article :-) I take everything back :-) -80.171.11.180 22:54, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, I agree with your criticism; I was just holding off until we could find reliable figures. Doesn't look like we're going to!
Interesting article in the Asia Times. Actually, their claim for Iranian Azeri is 4M, not 7M: the 7M is an ethnic figure which includes 3M "Persianized" Azeris. I can only assume that "Persianized" means Persian speaking. (I would assume that the Azeris leading the Iranian govt are native Persian speakers from Tehran.) That's only 5-7%! So our estimates actually range from 5-35% of Iran, which is absolutely ridiculous, for an average figure of ~24M total. However, news articles are generally unreliable, and we have no idea what the Asia Times author's sources are. kwami 00:34, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

blinded by statistics

can we please have a column that states clearly and simply how many people speak each language in total? i tried, but i couldnt do it without deleting data which i most certainly didnt want to. can someone else help? mastodon 20:49, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

No, we can't. No one knows. Unless you can find a source with the data we need! kwami 22:25, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand why we should care what speakers subjectively consider their languages. Yes, Mandarin speakers consider other dialects to be "Chinese" technically, for instance, but they actually distinguish. For instance, it is common practice to refer to Mandarin as "zhongwen", which means "chinese" and to refer to one's one native language as a "fangyan", or dialect. This implies that Mandarin itself is not a dialect, but rather "the" language of Chinese. Sometimes, speakers will use "hanyu" to refer to all types of chinese. A lot of this is really just political and not something to hang a linguistic hat on! [anon]

Are you prepared to deny that the Portuguese, Dutch, or Ukrainians have a language of their own (after all, they're just dialects of Spanish, German, and Russian, right?), and then defend the article against edit wars by those who believe they do? kwami 09:01, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
fair enough. i'm out of my league mastodon 20:38, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
I once tried doing what you're suggesting, and it was a disaster. Even if we could protect the article against nationalism, we simply don't have the data as to how close different languages/dialects really are. We'd have to run intelligibility tests, and that's only been done in a very few cases. Even then, the methodology isn't always compatible between different studies. kwami 22:45, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Romani as an official language in the Netherlands?

I was just looking at the table, searching for the Netherlands. According to this table, Romani is an official language in the Netherlands? According to the Netherlands page, we only have Dutch and Frisian, which makes a lot more sense to me.

The Netherlands gives a lot of official recognition to its minorities. Yiddish was once listed as official in the Netherlands too, but has since been removed. We don't have a good source for this, though, so if you're able to either support or refute it, that would be appreciated. kwami 08:33, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
In the Dutch Law "Algemene Wet Bestuursrecht" The only language allowed for the goverment is Dutch. Only Frisian is allowed as language in Friesland (Dutch Province). At school the official language is Dutch, but it has been permitted to give the lokal language as a proffession. (recource (in Dutch): http://neon.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/langvar/statusdutch/)

Bias related to language/dialect debates

I'm interested to know how the debate around whether the spoken variants of Chinese are dialects of a language or languages of a language family can be handled in this list without biased towards any of the two opposing opinions? Thanks. — Instantnood 19:55, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

The only practical and consistant way to make this list work is to list them under Chinese. Otherwise we'd need to separate all languages according to mutual intelligibility, which would be an impossible task, and anyway would be constantly reverted by the many people it would offend. (We tried it once.) kwami 21:56, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
I noticed there are a few sentence in the introductory paragraph over this issue. I've slightly expanded it, so it also serves as a disclaimer. [7] — Instantnood 18:37, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Non-sovereign territories

In his edits [8] [9] [10], user:Alanmak has attempted to list Hong Kong and Macao under the People's Republic of China. In response I've listed other non-sovereign territories under their corresponding sovereign states [11]. I would like to know the opinion from the rest of the community on how the matter should be handled. Thank you. — Instantnood 18:37, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Provinces of the US, Canada, Australia, India, China, Russia, etc. I would definitely enter as either China (Hunan) or Hunan (China), because we can't expect people to recognize them all. However, for semi-independent, territorial, or recently independent polities, such as the Cook Islands, I'm not sure that's a good idea. Counting them as their parent state could be misleading. Do we really want to list English in the Netherlands because of Aruba, or should we just list Aruba? Or at least "Aruba (Netherlands)" rather than "Netherlands (Aruba)"? (I'd still want "USA (Hawaii, California)", but Guam etc could follow the Aruba model.) And please no formalistic "Kingdom of the Netherlands" or "Hong Kong S.A.R." - there's no need for it, and it takes up too much room. kwami 19:46, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
Basically agree with the "Guam (US)" model (or perhaps "Guam (United States)"). As for "Kingdom of the Netherlands", it's a bit tricky, since legally the Netherlands (in Europe), the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba are constituents of the kingdom. — Instantnood 19:53, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
User:Huaiwei and user:Alanmak has continued to disagree with the listings of Hong Kong and Macau, both are not sovereign state [12] [13]. I'd like to seek consensus from the community on how these countries that are not sovereign state should be presented. — Instantnood 15:01, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
HK and Macau are not sovereign states indeed, so your point being?--Huaiwei 15:30, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
The niceties of whether Aruba belongs to the Netherlands or whether both belong to the Kingdom of the Netherlands is a bit arcane for a simple country listing, IMO.
Listing, say, Xmas Is. separately from Oz for Chinese, when Oz as a whole has a sig. Chinese pop., and being consistent with the rest of the article, would necessitate a whole bunch of additions to our list. I've reverted because no one's tried doing this systematically for all languages & all countries, which would be something of a headache. kwami 16:06, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
It's very true that many things are arcane, but I always believe we have to deal with these things since Wikipedia is an encyclopædia. I'm not sure if the number Chinese speakers exceeds 1% of the population of Australia, but the picture of the Christmas Island is definitely very different. Lots of efforts is necessary, but that's not a reason we cannot and shouldn't do so. — Instantnood 16:15, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
Oz h b updated per the latest census, so the Chinese shd b right. I like how you handled Aruba - it's informative but still legible, but doesn't Netherlands (Netherlands) read a little funny? kwami 20:13, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
Thank you. Please help check if there's any other mistake and error. The way the Netherlands is presented may bit quite funny (in fact I was copying and pasting ([[Kingdom of the Netherlands|Netherlands]]) to the three and wasn't aware), but is there any better way?  :-) — Instantnood 20:51, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
(response to Huaiwei's comment at 15:30, January 1) Either list all countries that are non-sovereign states under the corresponding sovereign states, or list them all on their own. — Instantnood 16:15, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Folks, this article is already enough to maintain without edit wars on formating. Let's resolve it here, okay? Can we put it to a vote?

As I see it, there are three points being debated:

  • Should non-incorporated but non-sovereign territories (Hong Kong, Christmas Island, Aruba, Gibraltar, Cook Is. have been mentioned) be listed separately or under their respective national government?
  • Should they be listed as e.g. "Gibraltar (UK)" or "United Kingdom (Gibraltar)"?
  • If a language is official for a sovereign state, should we list all non-incorporated territories of that state where it is also official? That is, should we list under English all the territories of the UK, US, NZ, and Oz?

Personally, I feel that the latter is an unjustified use of space in an already overly long article. If a reader wants that much detail, they can go to the individual articles. I feel that territories should only be listed when the language in question does not apply to the entire state, just as we do with incorporated territories. For example, we mention Chinese as a language of California, because it's sig there but not in the US overall, but we don't mention all 50 US states under English, nor do we separate England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland, because the US and UK are already listed under English. The same should apply to national territories such as Guam and Jersey.

kwami 19:44, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Don't think we can assume these countries must be having the same language policy with their corresponding sovereign states, although quite many of them do. — Instantnood 19:16, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
All 50 US states are free to set their own official/national languages. (I know English isn't "official" in many US states, but it's national in the sense of being tha language of government.) So are the 30-some Russian republics. Do we really need to list them separately? Can't we just assume that they share the federal language unless otherwise stated? We need to be concerned with bloat. This article takes too long to download as it is.
Regardless, both of you, can we quit the name calling and accusations of bad faith? It's juvenile. Let's resolve this on the talk page instead of disrupting the article. kwami 21:14, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
I'm afraid you've missed something. Those are not constituents of federations. Constituents of federations need not be separately listed, but under the listings of the federations. — Instantnood 21:36, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
If HK is listed separately because it controls its language policy, then the US states and Russian republics should be listed separately as well, because they also control their language policy. kwami 22:49, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
So precisely.. if the decision of the community is to sort the entire list according to sovereign states, then list all those that are not under their corresponding sovereign states. If the decision is to list all countries on their own, then don't discriminate some of them but not the others. — Instantnood 23:15, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't follow your argument. Chinese is listed as official for China. That includes HK and Macau. If Chinese weren't official in HK and Macau, we would list it as "China (except HK and Macau)" or "China (Mandarin official except in HK & Macau, where Cantonese is official)" or something like that. Similarly, if Russian were not official in Tatarstan, the entry under Russian would be "Russia (except Tatarstan)". There's no need to list every republic in Russia.
As for non-incorporated territories, I personally wouldn't list any of them unless there's reason to. There's no need to list Christmas Island under English, because it's subsumed under Australia. If you insist on listing HK & Macau, perhaps we could have "China (including HK & Macau)" or "China (Mandarin official; Cantonese co-official in HK & Macau)". We really should try to consolidate this list. kwami 02:08, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
If Greenland or Gibraltar were not listed, I'd bet few readers could promptly tell their official languages are Danish and English, respectively, from the listings of Denmark and the UK. Are they taking up so much space, that only sovereign states should appear on the list? Further, please be reminded that they're not constituents of federations. Tartarstan or Califonia are not comparable. — Instantnood 18:15, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I expect people would. Gibraltar at least is very very British. Amd the argument for listing HK and Macau separately was that they have separate language policy from the mainland, not that they're part of a federation. If it's truly a problem, we could always list "United Kingdom (incl. dependencies)" etc. Or we could add a proviso in the intro that dependencies are subsumed under their head states unless indicated otherwise, and could give Greenland as an example. And yes, they do take up a lot of room: they double the size of the entry for English. kwami 19:12, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Thank you. The next thing we've to do is to see if there's a clear majority of the community having the same or similar expectation. English is only among the over hundred languages on the list, and, thanks to the number of territories under British, US and Australian sovereignty, English is obviously an exception. Instantnood 19:37, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Pashto

According to the article Pashto, native Pashto-speakers are ~40m ... this should be corrected in the ranking. Tajik 13:25, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

They've falsified the data. The reference they give lists 20.3M, not ~40M. I'll correct the Pashto article. Thanks! kwami 16:11, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

1% of population

Does it make sense to apply the same 1% standard to all countries? For countries with huge population, even 0.5% would be significant enough. For example, there are 1.2 million of Belarusian speakers, and 636 thousand Kazakh speakers in Russia, but that's less than 1% of Russia's population of 143 million.

I suppose anybody would agree 1.2 million or 636 thousand are significant enough. The number of German, Chinese languages and French speakers in the United States is also well below 1% of the population.

What about having an absolute standard as well, e.g. 500 thousand, regardless of whether the 1% threshold has been reached? — Instantnood 14:11, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

That would give a rather skewed impression of a language. If Kazakh has 600k evenly scattered across half a continent, they might be less significant locally that a language with 6k on a small island nation. Think of the impact it would have if you visited Russia - not much at all. Remember, we're not even including languages with 600k in our list, so it's in effect already been decided that that's an "insignificant" number. I think if you wish to split up the Russian Federation into its constituent republics, as I've done with the US, Canada, UK, and France, then that would be useful: Kazakh may well be locally significant in parts of Russia. I think we should ideally do this with Russia, China, India at least, and maybe Indonesia, Brazil. (I unfortunately do not have the data handy.)

large Korean community in Mauritania???

This has to be either a typo or a joke. I removed it.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But according to the Ethnologue report for Mauritania, there are 60 000 Korean speakers in Mauritania, 2% of the population. kwami 00:29, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the link. However, if you look more closely, you see that it is based on studies from 1967 and 1970. There is also no backup data cited. The other languages he lists all have much more recent (1995+) backup data. Furthermore, it is a logical conjecture (conjecture nonetheless) that there could have been large numbers of Koreans in the country during 1967-70 when Moktar Ould Daddah was president; he was a socialist who might have solicited assistance from, say, North Korea. There are no references I could find any newer than 1970 to any significant number of Korean speakers in the country, nor to any significant number of Korean individuals in the population. The CIA world factbook does not list any. I stand by my original conclusion.
You may be right. I won't revert if you decide to delete again. kwami 05:34, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I did delete again; it just made no sense to have it there. Thanks.

WA

Hi! I'm getting data out of this article for the Spanish Wikipedia. Can anybody tell me what WA stands for? Thank you very much. --Suso de la Vega 13:31, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

World Almanac. The unexplained abbreviations are taken from Ethnologue. kwami 19:10, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

More discussion on the Chinese langauge

User:Kwamikagami made a pretty good arrangement for the entry for "Chinese" in the table, unlike some people who just blindly reverted my edits. But there comes a question. It seems that the law of the Hong Kong S.A.R. only says that the official languages of the region are "Chinese and English". For Chinese, it is not explicitly said that "Chinese" must be "Mandarin Chinese" and "Cantonese Chinese". (Those who know Chinese may refer to this article in the Chinese Wikipedia for this point.) Therefore, it may not be the most accurate to say that "Cantonese and Mandarin are co-official in Hong Kong." Actually, we don't really have to make the problem more complicate. As the law only says that "Chinese is an official language of the Hong Kong S.A.R.", we don't have to mention about whether it is "Mandarin Chinese", "Cantonese Chinese" or something else. As the official language of the People's Republic of China (including Hong Kong and Macau) is Chinese, we don't have to mention Hong Kong and Macau again separately. What do you guys think? - Alanmak 21:21, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, Alan, your constant personal attacks make you look like an [deleted]. People want to work with people who are polite and civil. There is no reason to get in a last dig at your opponent; if you present an intelligent case, people will recognize it. However, if you contaminate your case with personal vendettas, people will dislike you, no matter how intelligent your position. You don't gain anything by behaving this way; if people dislike you, they may oppose your points of view from an emotional rather than intellectual response, and everybody loses.
PS. In case you think I'm unfairly singling you out, I'm PO'd at all three of you for playing Three Stooges with this article.
As for the subject at hand, maybe we should use the phrase "de facto co-official". I believe you're right that there'd be no need to include HK as officially Chinese if that were all there were to it. However, HK does differ from the mainland. The Hindi and Arabic entries are similar: Not all countries where Hindi or Arabic are official actually use the same language. Similarly, Cantonese and Mandarin are both used in an official capacity in HK (even if they aren't explicitly official), whereas only Mandarin is used officially on the Mainland (so far as I know). This is worth mentioning, as this is precisely this kind of information people come to this article for. Also, if any other variant of Chinese is used in an official capacity, such as Taiwanese (bill tabled to the legislature but evidently not under consideration), then they should be mentioned as well. If Zhejiang started using Wu in sessions of its provincial govt, then I would want to list them separately as well. kwami 22:11, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
The footnote contains some good information. But why should Chinese in China get special treatment? We could add a footnote like this to every country entry for every language. That's way too much; if people want the details, they can go to the relevant country articles. Also, Mandarin is explicitly official in Taiwan and Singapore, so that should not be removed. Perhaps we could add simplified/traditional if you feel it is warranted. kwami 22:34, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
Generally agree.. many languages need footnotes too in that case. Please, however, be reminded that Zhejiang is not comparable with the case of Hong Kong or Macau. — Instantnood 17:53, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Why not? This is an article about languages, not about political entities. The legal status of Zhejiang v.-a-v. HK is irrelevant - if Zhejiang had established its own official language, it should be listed that way. If HK did not have a separate language policy, there would be no reason to list it at all. kwami 18:57, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
If political statuses were irrelevant, there'd be no reason to have the listings according to political entities. It's exactly because of the political statuses of Hong Kong and Macau, that their policies of languages are their policies, even if they happened to be the same as the rest of the PRC. The language policy of the Central People's Government in Beijing has no effect in Hong Kong and Macau, just as the language policy of the United Kingdom in Gibraltar or Canada. — Instantnood 20:27, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
To equate the relation between HK and Zhejiang with that of United Kingdom and Canada suggests we are dealing with two independent states, which is not the case. And while the language policy in the UK may have no effect on Gibraltar, it is worth nothing it does not exist as a seperate entry where the UK is also listed.--Huaiwei 11:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
Sorry to jump in here, I don't know much about the Chinese debate; just that if its anything like the Hindi-Urdu one, you could discuss it, and argue about it forever. In the Hindi-Urdu case, it is largely political (though there are very small and valid linguistic differences). Just my two cents, which may be way out of place here. Just thought I'd add my perspective for what its worth (if anything). Khiradtalk 07:02, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Christmas Island

The Christmas Island has a population with an ethnic Chinese majority. Should it be separately listed under the row for Chinese languages? The picture of Australia is pretty much different, although the number of speakers of Chinese languages is also significant there. (How significant by the way? 5%? We don't have the information on Wikipedia do we?) — Instantnood 20:40, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

How many of the Chinese speak Chinese natively? If Chinese is the majority language, maybe we could list it as sig. pop. in Australia (majority in Xmas Is.). Or maybe plurality if it's not quite the majority. kwami 22:40, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
How significant is the language in Australia? — Instantnood 22:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
If I remember correctly, the census figures were a couple percent. kwami 00:42, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

US states

US states have been listed according to the 2000 Census. If a language was 0.9% I counted it as 1%, since the census isn't all that accurate. Chinese is sig. in Massachussets; Tagalog is not sig. in New York. (It's less than 1/2%) kwami 08:29, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Burmese

There is a large difference in the number of native speakers of Burmese between this list and Burmese language. That article seems to agree with Ethnologue which says that 10 million out of 32 million are native speakers, but Ethnologue's wording is obscure. — AdiJapan ☎ 07:32, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't know, it seems pretty clear to me:
Population: 32,000,000 in Myanmar (2000 D. Bradley). Population total all countries: 32,301,581.
Language use: National language. 10 million second-language speakers.
That gives me a total of 42M. kwami 11:26, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh... I guess I misread it. Then Burmese language is wrong (in two places). — AdiJapan ☎ 13:34, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, if their source is Ethnologue (seems likely: 32M minus instead of plus 10M = their figure of 22M), I'd think they're wrong. Ethnologue normally lists native speakers, not total speakers. However, they may have used another source, one more accurate than Ethnologue. kwami 20:26, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

List of languages by total native speakers and French

First of all, this other article and its redirects can easily be confused with this one. Second, it gives a range for French from 72-129 million native speakers. Here the numbers are 67 million 130 million total. The article French language gives 87 million native, 190 million total. Given that France alone already has a population of 63,5 million and French is official language in 29 countries I think 67 million is really a bad estimate. You already get a higher number if you add the 7.6 million Québécois, and then you still have the 3.4 million Wallonian and more than a million the French Swiss. Get-back-world-respect 02:55, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that title should redirect here. I'll fix it. As for French, it's been discussed at length above. If you have any data, great; otherwise there's not much point in discussing it further. kwami 06:27, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Persian numbers fixed

Number of native speakers of Persian fixed according to Ethnologue. Heja Helweda 22:58, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

You didn't actually fix the numbers, only moved the entry to an inappropriate location. We've discussed likely figures for Persian; Ethnologue is not to be relied on. kwami 01:55, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
This article mentions Ethnologue as a major source. So I think it should be cited here. Editors can not decide whether a source is to be relied on or not. Just cite sources. Please note that "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. It's important to note that "verifiability" in this context does not mean that editors are expected to verify whether, for example, the contents of a New York Times article are true. In fact, editors are strongly discouraged from conducting this kind of research." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability Heja Helweda 03:46, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Number of German speakers?

The number of German first-language speakers looks a tad high to me. The main countries listed as having the largest German-speaking populations are:

Germany with 82.5 million total population
Austria with 8.2 million total population
Belgium with 10.4 million population
Italy (South Tyrol) where the population of South Tyrol is estimated as 0.5 million
Liechtenstein with a population of 32 k
Luxembourg with a population of .5 million
Switzerland, where 63.7% of the population speaks German,over a total population of 7.4 million, for 4.7 million German speakers.

If we add the TOTAL population of all countries listed (except Italy and Swtizerland),we get 106.8 million population. If we take into account that we can only count as native speakers people over 5 years of age, and have to exclude the allophone population, we conclude that no more than about 85% of the population of the German-speaking countries actually do speak German as a first language (France's proportion of Francophones is 82% and the United States' proportion is around 83%, so that doesn't sound unreasonable. If we then apply this 85% rule to those countries, we get:

Germany: 70.1 M
Austria: 8.84 M
Belgium: 6.97 M (grossly overestimated - we are counting the French and Walloon populations as speaking German)
Italy - South Tyrol: 0.5 M (leave as is)
Liechtenstein: 0.032 M (leave as is)
Luxembourg: 0.5 M (leave as is)
Swtizerland: 4.7 M (leave as is)

For a total of 91.6 million, well below the estimated 101 million German first-language speakers listed. Am I forgetting anything, or does the estimate seem a tad high?Ramdrake 18:26, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Ethnologue has 95.4M Standard German speakers, and 6.0M speakers of Swiss, all countries, as of 1990. Presumably the numbers haven't changed much in 15 years. 28M 2nd lang speakers standard German. "Standard German" includes Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Kazakstan, Paraguay, but only 0.15M in Belgium, since they speak Flemish, not German, and only 0.01M in Luxembourg, since Luxembourgish is counted separately. So Standard + Swiss + Lux. = 102M. The question is whether we count these as one language, as we do for Italian or Chinese. —kwami 19:18, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the number of first language speakers I have to concur. It is around 100 million. Thats what most estimates conclude, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. Seems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_speaker_data support that as well. Regarding second language speakers I somewhat disagree with that assessment. I do not have any numbers on other countries than EU, but I believe the numbers of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Union are quite accurate. There are from very recent data of the European Union. In the document http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_237.en.pdf, it is stated that within the EU of 25 (with the new states) German is spoken within the EU by 18 percent natively and 12 percent as second language. The population of the EU is 459,500,000. So that means:

82,000,000 million natively 55,140,000 million as second language.

But, in addition the EU documents provides also the skill that the second language is spoken. In German it is 20, 38, 41 %, between very good, good, and basic. Because the number of basic speakers can't really be included, that means for the EU:

82,000,000 million natively 31,981,200 million as second language (either very good or good spoken)

I cannot provide numbers for other countries, though. But, maybe someone else can. So, I would't really put the numbers of second speakers below the numbers of just the EU. --Lucius1976 20:46, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

None of the other languages are based on how many speak them well. They're based on how many speak them as a daily language, such as the language of instruction at school, or their language outside the home. kwami 19:53, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Who defined that? In that way estimates or educated guesses of second language speakers is even harder that way. Think we need to discuss that at lenght if not already did so here. And, how do you know that the number of second language speakers from the verious sources is defined in that manner you describe? Can't find anything like that. Even more, how do you know if the number of second language speakers of German in EU don't use it to what amount as a language of instruction in school? Sounds to me as a quite fuzzy definition, especially regarding regions with many languages and interaction, like india or european union. Think the best way if someone wants to get somewhat accurate figures is to only count those as second language speaker of a language if that language is the only official, or dominant one, in on country and he himself speaks another language as mother tongue. --Lucius1976 20:42, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

No, that would mean that only official/national languages would have second language speakers - not very fair to the majority of languages. The definition we're using is that of Ethnologue, which is the source for 90% of this article. I wouldn't object to some other definition, but I can't imagine how you would make it consistant across all the languages we list. Certainly a definition based on how people rate how well they speak some language they learned in school is going to be highly inconsistant between the various polls. kwami 21:57, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

The numbers in ethnologue for German are a complete mess. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90073. It also includes many dialects, with figures, but no absolute number of entire German. For instance: Alemannic. Alemannic is spoken in Switzerland (Schwyzerdütsch), but also in South-Western Germany. Thats were the 6 million is coming from. 4 million Switzerland, 2 million South-Western Germany. While it is true for many in Switzerland that they speak High German as second language, it is less so the case in South-Western Gemany. But, to some extend it is true for allmost all dialects in Germany. They even count a ethnic swabian population under Ethnic population: 820,168 (2000 WCD). Anyone is able to count a ethnic swabian population in plain nuts! Forgive me for saying so, but this numbers there a completely mysterious. Even my local dialect http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=vmf mainfränkisch is not missing. Interesting "approximately 40% inherently intelligible with Standard German". Or at least that is what say are saying. "Experts" talking, lol. It gets even better, the number of speakers of bavarian is 7 million in Austria and a mere 246,000 in Bavaria itself. LOOOOOOOOOL. They are simply nuts! Guess they were on the Octoberfest when they made up this numbers. No, Ethnologue is no serious source for German and its dialects. I am therefore conclude the number of second language speakers is bullshit as well. --Lucius1976 09:45, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the EU figures look reliable. For example if you look at Spain, 9% say their second language is another EU language - that corresponds with the 10% who say their first language is Catalan or Basque. So it looks as if those 9% are describing Spanish as "another EU language", they are not talking about English, French or German (otherwise the figure would be higher). Jameswilson 01:51, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Persian numbers

Since there is no official census on the number of native speakers of various languages in Iran, any figure would be at best an estimate. it is better to include all existing estimates, like CIA estiamte and Ethnologue's estimate and mentioning the date of the estimate.Heja Helweda 19:04, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Number of native speakers of Persian accroding to CIA world Factbook

Total: 58,413,352. CIA World Factbook does not provide estimates for the other countries. I suggest to drop the upper limit of 70 million. Ther may be 2 million Iranians or Persians in the west (North Amrica,Europe), so an estimate of 58-60 would be more accurate.Heja Helweda 19:43, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Claiming that there are "58.4 million" Persian speakers is irresponsible. Estimates only agree to the nearest ten million, so how can we claim a precision of 100 000? Sorry, I'm reverting. kwami 21:02, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
What is the source for 70 million figure, I cannot find it. Heja Helweda 22:54, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Another source for Persian

Number of native speakers of Persian according to a more recent source (with higher numbers than Ethnologue), with breakdown of different dialects:

  • Total: 48,399,321.

Heja Helweda 22:59, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Mazandarani is mutually unintelligible for Persian speakers

For an academic source on this see Bilingualism in Mazandaran: Peaceful Coexistence With Persian, according to which, Mazandarani is mutually unintelligible with respect to Persian (page 66). I suggest to remove Mazandarani from the Persian block.Heja Helweda 00:11, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

The estimates written in the article have already accounted for that.--Zereshk 09:02, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

English as an official language of the UK

Pedantry I know, but the UK has no official language. Official recognition is given to Welsh, Irish and such minority languages (mostly by the devolved governments I think) but there is nothing giving English an sort of offical status. Indeed, the Queen's motto is in French and the Prince of Wales' one is in German! 2110h (UTC) 01 March 2006

Basque entry removed, why?!

Please, I can not understand why a language such the Basque (~700,000 speakers) it is not in the list. For such motive, I added it -Faragon-, but removed almost inmediately by Kwamikagami about 3 hours after (!):

(cur) (last) 00:43, 3 March 2006 Kwamikagami m (Reverted edits by Faragon (talk) to last version by Kwamikagami)

The list is limited to languages with 1 million native speakers or more. If you wish to add Basque, great, but you'll need to add all of the world's languages with that number of speakers - probably several hundred.
Granted, there are a couple languages with less than 1M, like Chechen, but they had had 1M speakers in earlier versions of this article and are being kept in case their population estimates return to 1M. kwami 23:57, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

I apologize for the incovenience, thank you. I added a new entry: 'Below one million native speakers'. faragon 01:59, 13 March 2006 (GMT+1)

Having had the opportunity to study a little Basque, I am sympathetic to your partiality for the language. However, this is not a list of interesting or notable languages, it is a list of the most populous languages. Basque just doesn't make it. In order to include Basque at 700k, we need to add all languages between 700k and 1M speakers, not just the ones we like. If you wish to prepare a list of all such languages, please do, but until then we shouldn't play favorites. kwami 04:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

The article title is "List of languages by number of native speakers", I think that it is generic enough for including *all* the languages, despite its popularity. I'm sorry to say that your last observation it is baseless, just an excuse. You put false argument when saying "However, this is not a list of interesting or notable languages", as the article title implicetely *includes*, etimologically, the posibility of adding every single live language. The article begins with a selfmutilation, with an *arbitrary* 1 million cut, think about the meaning of an enciclopedia: knoledge accumulation + access, thus eliminating such minor entries the only thing you reach is the incompleteness. The worst thing in this case, is that instead of writing this "hey you, why are you doing what are you doing", that effort could have been inverted into adding new languages, etc. faragon 17:51:51, 13 March 2006 (GMT+1)

Are you volunteering to add all 5000 remaining languages of the world?
Of course the cutoff is arbitrary. The article is huge; it may have been better to have a cutoff of 3 million. The 1% cutoff for what is "significant" in a country is also arbitrary. If you wish to change the cutoff to half a million, be my guest -- but be responsible enough to do it consistantly. This is a "list of languages", not a "list of languages Faragon thinks are important". kwami 17:03, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry but your last argument is demagogic, tergiversating/twisting my words, as in no way was my intention to push for a subset of languages, simply I noticed that one wasn't in the list, and I added it (I have no special interest nor sympathy for that language other that it is spoken relativelly near where I live), others may contribute too, of course, remember, in these chapters you're the censor, not me. I just wast adding a contribution, I assume that the Wikipedia is a *collective* effort, not a work of few. I assume your moves are related to considerate more or less "complete additions" rather than "little differential additions", these are two points of view, you opt for the first, and I prefer the second. Anyway, as the common sense usually it is in the middle, I agree that adding the 500k-1m entry could be interesting. By the way, I resign from adding anything to this article, I'm discouraged. I'll try with others. Thank you for your attention. faragon 19:09, 13 March 2006 (GMT+1)

Where is List of languages by number of speakers?

When I speak English to someone I want to know whether they can speak English or not. I don't care if it's a native language to them.

Many of the people I work with don't have English as a native language, but they speak perfectly good English. The New Zealand Census doesn't collect data about native languages. They ask whether people can hold a conversation on a lot of everyday things.

This is far more interesting, useful and relevant than something about native speakers.

Ben Arnold 23:34, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Good luck finding that data. This list is as complete as we can have it with a universal standard. If we were to make the minimum requirement being "proficient" or "fluent," or just "intermediate" (conversing on everyday things, e.g.), then we would only be able to have ten or twenty complete entries in the list, with the rest lacking the necessary data. Though I would like such a list, it's simply not feasible with so little data.
Yom 03:18, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
Still, I agree with Ben Arnold here. At the very least, the link List of languages by total speakers shouldn't dìrect here, as these numbers cannot be called "total", because of the restrictive nature of the list. However, I can't help but muse that a rather large number of the other-language wiki entries parallel to this one have at least attempted to come up with figures of total numbers of speakers worldwide (for those that I could translate, it seemed to be based on the criterion of fluency, not language of upbringing).
Also, I was wondering, if someone is raised in a certain language, but loses fluency due to disuse of their "mother tongue", are they to be considered native speakers of which language? I wouldn't count the language in which they were brought up, since they cannot fluently communicate with it, but according to the definition in this article, they can't be considered native speakers of any other language if they say, started learning only when they started school. However, they must be native of some language.
No flames please, but I thought I would speak my mind on what I find a deficient definition of "native speaker", even though a more expanded definition may require more work, and some of the data is quite possibly absent.
Ramdrake 20:24, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

I must agreee with the first comment; total number of speakers is much more useful than total number of native speakers, despite the paucity of data. Perhaps a separate wikipedia entry with rough estimates of total speakers would be useful? -A student at Duke University

state (region) vs. region (state) format

Looks like we're heading for another stupid edit war between Alanmak and Instantnood over state (region) for autonomous territories vs. region (state) for non-independent countries, apparently triggered by some POV war over the proper treatment for Hong Kong. This is a huge waste of time. Why don't we put our energies into something constructive?

I'm going to support "state (region)" for all political entities. This way it doesn't matter what your view of the political situation is, or whether countries under very different systems are truly "equivalent" or not. I believe that having some regions "state (region)" and others "region (state)" is inherently POV (whether or not it's justified - that's not the point), and the easiest way to avoid a POV war is to skirt the issue by not bringing it up at all. It's not that Alanmak's position is more neutral, but it's more agnostic, and Instantnood has not edited the article so that all non-independent countries are treated equally (at lest not recently).

Everyone knows what Hong Kong is, and if they don't they can always click on the link. The fight belongs there, not here.

I think we've heard enough from both Alanmak and Instantnood. Does anyone else have an opinion? If there's a general consent to Instantnood's proposal, then I'll go along (personally I don't care much which way we go), but otherwise I'll support Alanmak as being the more agnostic position. kwami 22:48, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

" so that all non-independent countries are treated equally " - Disagree. What user:Alanmak has been doing [14] is only targeting on Hong Kong and Macao, but not all the others, e.g. Puerto Rico, Guam, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, Greenland, Faroe Islands. — Instantnood 21:22, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
You're perfectly right. We need to go through and clean it up. HK and Macau should not singled out as having less status in China than, say, Guam does in the US. But let's put that off until we came to some kind of consensus as to which format to use. kwami 23:30, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
User:Alanmak may not agree, since he has been arguing that the status of Hong Kong and Macau is not comparable to entities like Guam, Aruba, Cayman Islands, Greenland, etc. — Instantnood 19:17, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
That's why I prefer listing everything with the same format. That way these kinds of opinions are irrelevant. kwami 19:26, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
We cannot disregard the fact that in real life they're rarely, if not never, listed in the same way as ordinary subnational entities. — Instantnood 19:36, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Of course we can. Who cares? It's not worth fighting over such petty details. It's a waste of time that could be spent on something worthwhile, like content. kwami 20:06, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia has to be descriptive. No body can make up her/his own standard, disregarding real life practices, and this is important for an encyclopædia. Wikipedia, as an encyclopædia, should not be bothered with whether you or anybody else care or not. — Instantnood 20:06, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
kwami, I've looked at this repeatedly over time via diffs and not seen the difference. Your asking for any other opinion, I looked at the resulting text, rather than trying to figure it out from the diffs. Alanmak's edits make more sense. It combines everything under one nation. I tried to avoid looking at Hong Kong, and instead looked at how it treated the United States. Seeing "Guam (United States), somewhere else, somewhere else, United States (California, Massachusettes, Washington)". That didn't make sense. Seeing United States (Guam, California, etc)" together does make more sense. Take that opinion as you wish. SchmuckyTheCat 21:54, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for your input. I'll try fixing up the entire article to match, unless someone else volunteers, but would like a little more consensus on which format to follow. (4 people isn't a fair sampling even if the vote is 3 to 1.) kwami 23:30, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
(response to user:SchmuckyTheCat's remarks at 21:54, March 21) This is not a listing by sovereign state, but country. In real life, these you-know-what are more frequently to be listed together with sovereign states, sometimes with round brackets telling their sovereignty holder. It's rare, if not never, to have them listed together with ordinary subnational entities. — Instantnood 19:17, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
(response to user:SchmuckyTheCat's remarks at 21:54, March 21) Nation ≠ sovereign state. — Instantnood 14:17, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
We aren't getting any more comments. I guess most people don't care one way or the other. I'll straighten out the article. As for InstantNood's last comment, this is a listing by whatever we decide to list by. It will be obvious enough what we're doing either way, so there's no problem of confusion. kwami 00:13, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
True. Nevertheless by doing so we're disregarding real life practices. — Instantnood 14:21, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
FYI, Kwami, I've added a sentence to the introductory paragraphs. [15] — Instantnood 14:17, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Swedish speakers

Did you bother to read the reply on my talk page before you reverted?

Fred-Chess 21:48, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, Wikipedia is not an adequate source for Wikipedia. I'm only too happy to improve on our Ethnologue data, which leaves a lot to be desired, but we need some sort of reasonably reliable reference, even if it's only mentioned here on the talk page. kwami 00:53, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


Significant communities

I have some issues with the expression "community". It implies that all native speakers of a given language form communities in another country. Surely that isn't always the case. Maybe we should rephrase that to just "speakers" or "native speakers"? --Lucius1976 22:06, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

You're right. In order for the number to be over 1%, there are almost certainly communities of speakers (otherwise there would be no stable transmission to native-born generations, and the immigrant generation routinely forms communities regardless), but that isn't the criterion for being mentioned. That criterion is raw numbers, so I'm opting for "significant numbers". kwami 22:18, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Not always the case that they form communities. Not even routinely. In some cases it doesn't happen. --Lucius1976 22:40, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Brazil has the biggest japanese community outside japan (see Japanese-Brazilian), however some editor insists that there is no significant japanese community in Brazil whatsoever!

This isn't a list of ethnicities, but of languages. 380 thousand Japanese speakers out of a population of 180 million is not "significant" by a long shot. (We have a cutoff of 1%, of course.) No significant population in the US either, though as I said in my edit summary, there may be significant numbers in some states. If you have that info for Brazil, knock yourself out! (While you're at it, add the other languages of Brazil.) kwami 18:17, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
380,000 native speakers of a language is a lot of people. It may not be significant in terms of the total number of Brazilians, but it seems arguably significant in terms of the total number of Japanese speakers outside Japan. john k 22:23, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
The problem is the 'arguably' part. We get into plenty of disagreements as it is on the data, without getting into the relative importance of numbers. We settled on the 1% criterion some time ago. I think if 1% of the Japanese speakers in the world were in Brazil, that might qualify, even if they didn't make up 1% of the population. But we have 0.3% of Japanese speakers making up 0.2% of Brazil. To be fair, we need the same cutoff for every language. The article would be twice as long with a 0.1% cutoff, and I don't know who would be willing to do all that work. kwami 01:25, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, fair enough. I think you should say, then, that 380,000 Japanese speakers in Brazil does not fulfill the arbitrary (but reasonable) standards we've laid out for the table, not that they're not significant, which is obviously POV. john k 02:46, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
The word was obviously being used in the context of the article. Thus the scare quotes. kwami 09:04, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
The US has 0.18% japanese speakers, totalling around 530.000 people (see Languages in the United States). Brazil has around 0.2% japanese speakers, totalling 400.000 people, with 2/3 of them in Sao Paulo (see Brasil in wikipedia portuguese, São Paulo). Therefore, either we let Brazil in the list or remove the US to be consistent. Rufiao 02:55, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Based on current policies, removing the US would appear to be the correct choice. john k 08:00, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

It might be a good idea to look over the article so you could see how it's organized. We don't list the whole US, we just list Hawaii. If Japanese made 1% of Sao Paulo state (which it apparently does not), then we would list "Brazil (Sao Paulo state)", as mentioned above. kwami 09:04, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Sao Paulo the state São_Paulo_(state) has 38M inhabitants, from which around 300.000 speak japanese, which means 0.8% of the population. I couldn't find specifics for Sao Paulo the city, however it's quite likely the japanese speakers concentration there is higher than in the state (especially because of the japanese neighborhoods and japanese schools there). Therefore, it's somewhat safe to assume there's around 1% of the population in Sao Paulo -- the city, as listed in the article-- speaking japanese.
We don't do cities. Not that we couldn't, just that it has never been done, and it would be a huge amount of work to list every 1% minority of every city on Earth. Plus the fact that the article is already too long for some people's tastes.
It would be nice to know where the São Paulo data is coming from. Not from Portuguese wiki, as near as I can tell, or at least not the Brazil, Sao Paulo, or Japanese articles. But 2/3 of 380,000 is a quarter million, 2/3 of 1% of the population of the state, which is close enough to want to verify the data, just in case it is 1%. kwami 18:02, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Just for the sake of comparison, Hawaii has 5% of its 1.2M population speaking japanese (Hawaii), which means 60.000 people. Guam has 7% "asian language" speakers [16] in its 170.000 population, meaning at most 12.000 japanese speakers. Sao Paulo (the state) has around 300.000 (73% of the country's japanese, according with [17]). Don't you think the 1% rule is acting more to distort facts than anything else in this case, given the quite small amount of japanese speakers outside Japan? According with Talk:List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers#1.25_rule_enforced there's space for exceptions. Regarding the "we don't do cities", check the fact that Sao Paulo has around 18M people (how many cities have this amount of people on earth?) -- although, right now, I'd vote to list the state as a relevant community. Rufiao 21:32, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Assuming that Japanese speakers pattern as Japanese immigrants (I suspect that the article is misworded and that what they really mean are people of Japanese immigrant descent), and that 73% of Brazilian Japanese speakers live in Sao Paulo state, that's 277,000, or 0.73%. Parana state would be closer, with 0.83%. As for exceptions, I think the only equivalent exception in the article is Korean in Japan. I would be happy to remove that once we get better data, but it might turn out to meet our criteria: 1M Korean citizens in Japan are already 0.8%, and that's not counting whoever among the Japanese-born people of Korean descent still speak the language (Ethnologue says 670,000 in 1988), and without knowing how much that 1M figure has been rounded off. So Korean might actually be 1% in Japan.
When I first came across this article, it was a real mess. You couldn't compare any of the languages, because all the popular ones had idiosyncratic criteria designed to please the people who liked them, with almost no attempt to be objective. If we make an exception for Japanese in Brazil, we'll need to make exceptions for French, special ways of counting to rank English #2 in the world instead of #4, for Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Serbian, etc etc etc, all of which people have argued vehemently for. Soon we'd be back to an article where nearly every entry is an "exception".
That's not what I mean. The issue here is the amount of japanese speakers outside japan is small, and most of it went to countries with large populations (Brazil and the US, respectively). Although their proportional participation in the demographics of these countries is small as a whole, they happen to be gregarious. The "1% rule" here is twisting facts by showing US states with small populations to have "significant" populations (undeniably), while forgetting places such as Sao Paulo (and possibly California), which have a proportionally small number of japanese (due to the fact these states have big populations), but, in absolute terms, and given the small amount of speakers outside japan, can't be neglected or downsized. Rufiao 03:03, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
As for the 1% rule skewing our presentation, any presentation will be skewed. Should Spanish, with 30% of the population of Belize, be removed as insignificant because it's only 80,000 people? I don't know how we could argue that 30% isn't significant. The way I look at it, the important thing is what you'd experience if you visited the place. You can find people to speak Spanish with in Belize without much trouble. But if you visited Sao Paulo, you'd have a much more difficult time getting by in Japanese, even though the number of people involved is several times greater. kwami 23:31, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, I know Sao Paulo pretty well and I can tell you it's hard to not spot japanese descendants in the streets, at least in the developed cities and neighborhoods. That's basically because the majority of the japanese are amongst the middle class (which accounts for 50 million of the 180 million inhabitants in the country, being the poor almost 130 million), which usually live in the "core" of most cities. Rufiao 03:03, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Although, to note, 1% of India or China is 10,000,000 people... 08:01, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that's a concern. I don't think we've agreed on a cutoff, but in effect languages are listed if a large fraction of their native-speaking range is located in a country like India or China. That's something we should settle: If 100,000 speakers of a language that only has 1 million total live in India, should it be listed under India? After all, it would be listed there by default if the majority of its speakers live there, even though that's well below 1% of India's population. kwami 18:08, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
From the 1M japanese speakers outside japan, 400.000 live in Brazil. You insist on revertting changes that state it is a relevant community for japanese. Your rationale here justifies it, no?
Of 125 million Japanese speakers, less than 0.4 million live in Brazil. That's 0.3%. I don't see how that can be justified unless we redo the entire article. kwami 22:53, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
All japanese speakers outsite Japan account of 0.8% of the total speakers. How it goes for Hawaii and Guam? 0.05% and 0.01% respectively. Given the small amount of japanese speakers outside Japan, it's kind of hard to deny that there is a significant community in Brazil, the 1% rule here is not doing any good to accuracy Rufiao 03:03, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
My understanding is that Japanese is better retained in some rural areas of Brazil than in the big city, with it being the dominant language in some cases. Might there be interior states with relatively low numbers of people but a high % of Japanese? kwami 01:34, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
The thing is not about country-side states, it's more about specific cities. The ones who live in rural areas tend to live around cities with high concentration of japanese descendants. The same thing goes for the larger metropolitan areas, they tend to concentrate in specific neighborhoods (although not as much as they do for smaller, rural cities). I don't think the majority of the japanese there are living in the country side; that could be the case before WWII, but since then they mostly went to metropolitan areas. Given that they tend to concentrate in specific cities and/or neighborhoods, it's definitely hard to not notice their influence in these places. What I mean is that the idea that they are evenly distributed throughout the country (or a given state) is absolutely flawed. You're likely to find no japanese descendants whatsoever in most places, and a huge concentration of them here and there. Rufiao 03:11, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
The same is true in California, which doesn't make the list either despite having a large and important Japanese community. kwami 03:40, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
If you think there's a large and important japanese community there and don't add it to list, then something is definitely wrong with the criteria used. Rufiao 13:39, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


Hebrew language

An anonymous user changed the number of speakers from 5.1 to 7.25 (which Kwamikagami quickly reverted). I don't really know much in this area, but I have seen the latter number before. Is the revert simply because it is a non-Ethnologue source, or is it an exaggerated number?

Yom 09:23, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't know. There was no reference. kwami 09:18, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

French in Aosta Valley

There is a misunderstanding: the official language in Aosta Valley is Franco-Provençal language, jointly with Italian, and this is different from French. I know that it is a dialect, but the Aosta Valley's charter says clairly that the language isn't french. --Ilario 15:25, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

It could be that I'm having a mistake. I've written to URP of Aosta Valley. I know that the french is spoken only by the 2% of population fr:Vallée_d'Aoste_:_La_francophonie vs the franco-provençal spoken by the 20% --Ilario 16:11, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
I receveid reply from Aosta and french and italian are jointly used in public acts except justice. --Ilario 08:41, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Is Provençal also official? kwami 09:19, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
In the Aosta Valley's charter only the French language is considered, I think because there is not a written Franco-Provençal (which is different from Provençal). This idiom is only a spoken language but 20% of people in Aosta Valley speaks it daily because the dialect in this valley is strongly influenced by Franco-Provençal. --Ilario 11:47, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Italian language

Please, reconsider the number of italians. Only Italian people is composed by 58 millions, we should consider also the Italians who live outside Italy but take the nationality, how you can see here it:Lingua_italiana#Diffusione (official data from Italian Foreign Office) at least 61 million of Italian Language speakers are Italian citizens. We should also consider Italian emigrant: like you can see here the 2,15% of USA people speaks regurlarly Italian at home (and we haven't considered the mother tongues): considering the USA population, these are 6,5 million. You can also see the talian language spoken in Brazil and emigrants in Canada and Australia to consider that the mother tongues are more than 70 millions. --Ilario 11:32, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Because there is a sceptical user, I add here references and I made here additions. I consider only mother tongues (abitants where Italian is official language and Italian citizens who lives outside Italy [18]):

Official status

Country Speakers Notes
Italy 58.000.000 -
San Marino 30.000 -
Swiss 400.000 (7% of population)
Swiss 520.000 (Italian citizens)
Croatia 35.000 -
Croatia 8.000 (Italian citizens)
Slovenia 6.000 -
Slovenia 2.000 (Italian citizens)
TOTALE 59.000.000 -

For the Swiss see [19] about the 2000's Census and Italian Foreign Office for the Italian citizens who live in Swiss (see "Svizzera"). --Ilario 16:19, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Other countries

Country Speakers Notes
Germany 708.000 (Italian citizens)
Argentina 358.000 (Italian citizens)
Brazil 292.000 (Italian citizens)
Belgium 281.000 (Italian citizens)
USA 6.050.000 United States Census, 2000#Languages_spoken_at_home
USA 189.000 (Italian citizens)
United Kingdom 173.000 (Italian citizens)
Canada 470.000 (Canada Census) Language_in_Canada#Language_composition
Canada 141.000 (Italian citizens)
Australia 353.000 (Australia Census) [20]
Australia 131.000 (Italian citizens)
Venezuela 121.000 (Italian citizens)
Uruguay 74.000 (Italian citizens)
Spain 61.000 (Italian citizens)
Chile 44.000 (Italian citizens)
South Africa 32.000 (Italian citizens)
Netherlands 30.000 (Italian citizens)
Perù 26.000 (Italian citizens)
Luxembourg 23.000 (Italian citizens)
Austria 14.000 (Italian citizens)
Greece 11.000 (Italian citizens)
Colombia 10.000 (Italian citizens)
Israel 10.000 (Italian citizens)
Ecuador 10.000 (Italian citizens)
Monaco 6.000 (Italian citizens)
TOTALE 9.662.000 -

For italian citizens see Foreign Office.

Where in the world did 6 million come from for Italian speakers in the US? The linked page shows that 2.15% of the 46,000,000 or so people who do not speak English in the home speak Italian. That comes out to about 1 million, and there's no reason to think this number does not include the 200,000 Italian citizens in the US. john k 19:50, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Second language

The previous part consider only a part of native speakers, but if we consider also the second language we should read this article from Italian Foreign Office. i.e. 36% of argentinian are Italian o descedent direct from Italian. Italian is spoken like second language in Malta and Somalia and the Corsican language is very similar to the Italian. --Ilario 16:57, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Ilario, I only ask for a reasonable reference. I can't believe that there isn't one for a language like Italian!
You give Wikipedia as a ref for Wikipedia. Not acceptable. It lists 6M Italian speakers in the US, and attributes that figure to the US Census. However, the US Census only estimated 1.01M Italian speakers. If all your sources are this exagerated (you link to blank websites), then there are only 1.6M Italian speakers outside [Italy + 7% of Switzerland]. kwami 20:36, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Excuse me! All numbers are referenced. All numbers give from Italian Foreign Office and Census (Swiss, Australian, Canadian, etc.). In the blank pages (as you interpret you should follow lins to have the numbers of italian citizens divided by consulates), the pages of Wikipedia are pages of US Census where there is no estimation, please, we are talking aboput a Census: a Census don't make estimation, a Census makes statistics and in this statistics you can see 2,5% of Americains who speaks Italian in his family. What is original research? I think that your number are original... give me your reference please. I read a number (61 million) this number it's a mistake. In this situation I am over you, because I've "official" statistic numbers. --Ilario 21:47, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
  1. Compiling official figures yourself is considered 'original research' by Wikipedia. You need one source for the number of native speakers.
  2. The US Census is an estimate. They don't count everybody. The estimate of 1M is on the page I gave you. Search the links, and you'll find it's actually 1.01M.
  3. Don't play petty games. You've said yourself that my source is Ethnologue, and I've admitted that it needs to be updated.
kwami 23:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)


  1. I've compiled nothing, I've simply added statistics. Is it important to have someone who know how use an abacus to have reference? My addition is simple, with some mistake, but anyone can correct it;
Adding statistics is compiling. You could be double counting (not that you're adding wrong, but the figures you're adding together could be counting the same people). They could be based on different criteria (such as the definition of 'speaker'), and thus be counteracting each other. Lots of things could go wrong.
  1. I'm phylologist and I can say that my consideration isn't a "research" because I'm simple taken data from official sources and it's not "original" because US Census and Foreign Minister "are" references and I've invented nothing;
Please read wiki help on 'original research'. You did not find any source that gives your figure, so it's something you created. That counts as O.R.
  1. Estimation? A census is a census [21];
Not in the US. The census is taken of a sample population and then extrapolated for the entire country.
  1. The number of Italian who speak Italian daily in USA is 1 million, but we have more than 1 million of descendant (mother tongue). It can be corrected: I've made this addition quickly searching sources on line (and not in books);
Descendant isn't the same thing as native speaker.
  1. I've seen that for Farsi and Uzbek there are references who makes what I've made: calculate the emigration (and I can read in Persian reference "Estimates of Persian-speaking people outside Iran")... I've indicate an in-depth numbers of Italians outside Italy and its source. Shall I create a web site to done a "reference" also to my "addition"?
These were last-resort solutions to grossly deficient data, to be replaced as soon as reliable data becomes available. They were also collaborations by several people in an attempt to sift out any errors. Languages like Persian and Uzbek are difficult because governments actually hide the information. If this were the case for Italian, your approach would be the right one, but I find it difficult to believe that no one knows how many Italian speakers there are, and that we have to figure it out for ourselves.
  1. At moment I'm searching a reference "on line" but this consideration of Italian Foreign Office could be important [22]. It's difficult to find because the calculation of the number of Italian emigrants is recently.
Unfortunately, they don't say how many of these people speak Italian natively.
About Ethnologue we have the same point of view... in any case the 61 million is very low, we have only 59 million of Italian who live in Italy. We should add also the emigrants (as Farsi) --Ilario 01:41, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Not all residents of Italy are native Italian speakers. We have to subtract some people too. kwami 06:50, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
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