You could do a similar analysis for other languages
Hey, thanks for that! It's a useful approach.
One of the other things that really might drop Arabic in particular in the rankings is that "Arabic" really is no more a single spoken language than "Chinese". (See my earlier post.) I don't have any figures on how many people actually speak Modern Standard Arabic, but it's probably a lot less than 340 million. If you consider the different varieties of Arabic in an analogous way that one generally thinks of the different varieties (dialects, languages, what have you) of Chinese, you start having to look at things like Egyptian Arabic (80 million) on its own, the way my very rough list already treats Gan-Hakka Chinese.
That gets into the question of where to draw lines between languages. I'm being relatively expansive with my definitions (Thai/Lao-Isaan, for example) because my interest is intelligibility, but I'm given to understand that most of the users of Maghrebi and Gulf Arabic (just to take a couple of geographic extremes) would have trouble talking to each other unless they were to shift to Modern Standard Arabic.
the degree of imprecision is huge.
Boy, isn't that true? I am really suspicious of any of the numbers I listed from Wikipedia that have more than two significant digits. Sometimes I feel like even that's relying on their numbers way too much. :)
One of the interesting things that this turns up is some general evidence for the collapse of French as an international language, although that might just be artifacts of data.
French usage in particular shows a couple of countervailing trends. On the one hand, it really is becoming less useful in the world in general. On the other hand, more and more people are learning it to talk to each other across Francophone Africa, which is itself a part of the world showing significant population growth.
Language is messy. But you were a linguistics major, many many moons ago, you understand that. :)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-31 05:25 pm (UTC)Hey, thanks for that! It's a useful approach.
One of the other things that really might drop Arabic in particular in the rankings is that "Arabic" really is no more a single spoken language than "Chinese". (See my earlier post.) I don't have any figures on how many people actually speak Modern Standard Arabic, but it's probably a lot less than 340 million. If you consider the different varieties of Arabic in an analogous way that one generally thinks of the different varieties (dialects, languages, what have you) of Chinese, you start having to look at things like Egyptian Arabic (80 million) on its own, the way my very rough list already treats Gan-Hakka Chinese.
That gets into the question of where to draw lines between languages. I'm being relatively expansive with my definitions (Thai/Lao-Isaan, for example) because my interest is intelligibility, but I'm given to understand that most of the users of Maghrebi and Gulf Arabic (just to take a couple of geographic extremes) would have trouble talking to each other unless they were to shift to Modern Standard Arabic.
the degree of imprecision is huge.
Boy, isn't that true? I am really suspicious of any of the numbers I listed from Wikipedia that have more than two significant digits. Sometimes I feel like even that's relying on their numbers way too much. :)
One of the interesting things that this turns up is some general evidence for the collapse of French as an international language, although that might just be artifacts of data.
French usage in particular shows a couple of countervailing trends. On the one hand, it really is becoming less useful in the world in general. On the other hand, more and more people are learning it to talk to each other across Francophone Africa, which is itself a part of the world showing significant population growth.
Language is messy. But you were a linguistics major, many many moons ago, you understand that. :)