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And what percentage of people in the world uses one of the languages in that 4% as their primary language? I'm guessing it's a really large percentage, probably
by w1ntermute 13y ago
And what percentage of people in the world uses one of the languages in that 4% as their primary language? I'm guessing it's a really large percentage, probably a majority of the world's population. It's not really useful to look at the percent of languages when they vary in the number of speakers by so much (and there's a long tail of languages with a vanishingly small number of speakers).
- vilhelm_s 13y agoIndeed. To get a rough idea I added up the first table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... , it seems that about 85% of the world population are native speakers of one of the top-100 (top 1.6%) languages.
- autarch 13y agoIt's not clear from the Wikipedia list if the language categories are mutually exclusive. For example, it seems quite likely that nearly everyone who speaks the Wu, Jin, and Min Nian Chinese family languages also speaks Mandarin. I'm not even sure what it means to say that Min Nian is the native language for anyone in Taiwan. Sure, lots of people learn it at home but anyone under 60 is going to be just as fluent in Mandarin.
- elliotlai 13y agoThe first language I learned is Min Nan, though my Min Nan is not as fluent as my Mandarin now, I still consider it my mother tongue.
- jacobwcarlson 13y agoThe cool thing about the Internet is that if you're curious about some data you can analyze it on your own. Perhaps you would show us what you've found? And what impact that's had on how you conduct business?