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> Swahili lacks the numbers of speakers, the wealth, and the political power associated with global languages such as Mandarin, English or Spanish. But Swahili
by twiss 5y ago
> Swahili lacks the numbers of speakers, the wealth, and the political power associated with global languages such as Mandarin, English or Spanish. But Swahili appears to be the only language boasting more than 200 million speakers that has more second-language speakers than native ones.
Not to detract anything from the article or Swahili, but surely this must be the case for English as well? Wikipedia on "English language" says:
Native speakers: 360–400 million
L2 speakers: 750 million
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoYou probably misunderstood. The 200 million are the L2 speakers. Very few speak Swahili natively.
- nerdponx 5y agoRight, but how many people speak English natively vs. speak it as a second language?
- arcticfox 5y agoIsn't that the claim for English as well? (Native speakers: 360–400 million L2 speakers: 750 million)
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago400 million is a lot! There are more native Dutch speakers than Swahili so I wouldn't say it's comparable at all.
- canadianfella 5y ago
- ljm 5y agoAs compared to English, one of the stated lingua francas, which zero people speak natively
- garbagetime 5y agoI speak English natively
- barry-cotter 5y agoNigeria has people whose home language is English. I’ve worked with some. I doubt there are many Nigerians who only speak English and Nigerian English as spoken on the street can be as different from the British standard as Scots or Jamaican patois but there are plenty of native English speakers on Africa. This shouldn’t be that surprising. The Indian subcontinent has plenty of ruling class Brown Englishmen like the Bhuttos or Gandhis who are on their third or fourth generation of English language medium education. Anglophone Africa isn’t that different in that respect. The ruling class spoke English at independence and people from different language communities who have a common language in English will raise English speaking children.
- zarzavat 5y agoNot disagreeing with the essence of what you said, but truthfully “L1” and “L2” is distinction without a difference because nobody can agree on what an L1 speaker or L2 speaker is and many people speak their putative L2 language better than their L1 language. Also many of the speaker counts on Wikipedia are very inaccurate and are just ballpark figures.