Current distribution of human language families
This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers.
However, all such rankings should be used with caution.[1] First, it is difficult to define the difference between a language and a dialect, or between a language and a macrolanguage; for example, Chinese is sometimes considered a single language and sometimes a macrolanguage whose many varieties are all independent languages.
For a list of languages with the smallest numbers of native speakers, see lists of endangered languages.
Contents
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Nationalencyklopedin 1
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Charts and graphs 2
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See also 3
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References 4
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External links 5
Nationalencyklopedin
The following table contains the top 100 languages by estimated number of native speakers in the 2007 edition of Nationalencyklopedin. As census methods in different countries vary to a considerable extent, and some countries do not record language in their censuses, any list of languages by native speakers, or total speakers, is based on estimates. Updated estimates from 2010 are also provided.[2]
The top eleven languages have additional figures from the 2010 edition of the Nationalencyklopedin. Numbers above 95 million are rounded off to the nearest 5 million.
Charts and graphs
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List of languages by number of native speakers, Packed bubbles.
[2]
See also
References
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^ Paolillo, John C.; Das, Anupam (31 March 2006). "Evaluating language statistics: the Ethnologue and beyond" (PDF).
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^ a b Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin. Asterisks mark the 2010 estimates for the top dozen languages.
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^ Includes approx. 100 million speakers of other Hindi languages listed below.
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^ a b c d e f g h This may be only a fraction of total speakers; others are counted under "Hindi" above.
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^ Numbers may also be counted in Punjabi above
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^ Only half this many use Belarusian as their home language.
External links
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The Ethnologue's most recent list of languages by number of speakers
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Languages Spoken by More Than 10 Million People (Archived 2009-10-31) – Encarta list, based on data from Ethnologue, but some figures (e.g. for Arabic) widely vary from it
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Map of World Languages. Download of MP3 audio files in 1600 language combinations.
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Languages
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By continent
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By country
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By population
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By family
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See also
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