Ling 001: Linguistic Typology

The Ethnologue Top 10

• Top 10:
• Language n(million)
• Mandarin Chinese 874
• English 341
• Spanish 322-358
• Bengali 207
• Hindi 181
• Portuguese 176
• Russian 167
• Japanese 125
• German 100
• Korean 78

Counting

• It was noted above that the numbers depend a lot on how the counting is defined
• Consider e.g. Arabic, one of the world’s major ‘languages’:
• Grouped together, all of the different varieties of Arabic have 219 million speakers (this would be number 4)
• However: different local varieties of Arabic are not mutually intelligible, and are therefore counted separately
• The difference between e.g. Algerian Colloquial Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic is reported to be like that between e.g. Spanish and Portuguese