In fact...
The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999) lists the following as the top languages by population:
(number of native speakers in parentheses)
- Chinese* (937,132,000)
- Spanish (332,000,000)
- English (322,000,000)
- Bengali (189,000,000)
- Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
- Arabic* (174,950,000)
- Portuguese (170,000,000)
- Russian (170,000,000)
- Japanese (125,000,000)
- German (98,000,000)
- French* (79,572,000)
6 comments:
I have a friend that told me that after Roman and Moorish rule, the "original" Spanish language, which, according to him, was similar to French, died ages ago. I'm not sure how accurate this is, but I thought it would be interesting to mention
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101227121649AAJNwOX
Year 1999? Do you have the latest figures?
Dead language? LOL He must have been really drunk
Actually, the term "Spanish" is incorrect because in Spain there are three main languages: Castellano, Catalán y Gallego.
The most known as Spanish is Castellano.Of course, to assure that it's dead is a nonsense..
@Steven the moors never ruled the whole of the Iberian peninsular. There were small Christian kingdoms to the north and namely the kingdom of Castile which unite all the christian kingdoms and expelled the moors out of the peninsular so saying Spain was ruled by the moors is wrong since there was no Spain back then only feuding kingdoms
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