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I'm curious about the discrepancy of the number of Arabic speakers. The article says 467 Million, while Wikipedia states 290 Million [1] I know that Wikipedia
by jaimebuelta 11y ago
I'm curious about the discrepancy of the number of Arabic speakers. The article says 467 Million, while Wikipedia states 290 Million [1]
I know that Wikipedia can't be taken as The Truth, but a quick search on Internet seems to get values closer to 200-300M than to 450M (except for Ulrich Ammon, which is the source for the post). It seems a sensible difference, anyone has an explanation?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic
- jaimebuelta 11y agoOk, I answer myself, there are some discrepancies on the graphic with the number of native vs total number of speakers. In some cases they are mixed, and that makes a difference. For example, in [1], the total (L1 + L2) is 490 M. The total for English is 840M, then, not ~500M, which is L2. The primary source is this [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... [2] http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size
- hasenj 11y agoArabic is not one language, but a family of languages, with "Standard Arabic" serving as an almost artificial lingua-franca, that no one actually can speak natively. I say almost artificial because it has never been any body's native language at any point in time. Now, Classical Arabic, theoretically was the native language of certain tribes in the Hijaz region (of modern day Saudi Arabia) some 1400 years ago. Standard Arabic is a modernized version of Classical Arabic. Some vocabulary have almost completely different meanings, and a large number of modern collocations would probably make no sense to the native speakers of Classical Arabic if they were alive today.