I got 8 of the 10 most spoken languages in the world correct. I’m not surprised I didn’t get the other two. I knew in general what they were but not specifically what they were.
I got 8 of the 10 most spoken languages in the world correct. I’m not surprised I didn’t get the other two. I knew in general what they were but not specifically what they were.
Not sure if Chinese should count. Watch someone who speaks Cantonese try to talk with someone who speaks Mandarin or any of the northwestern languages.
Steve
My first try was “Mandarin”. “Chinese” isn’t a language; it’s a language family, as I’ve pointed out before.
When French wasn’t a correct answer, I knew I was screwed. Then when Arab and Hindu weren’t correct (wrong form), I gave up.
Looking at my copy of Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word (2006) the top ten would include French and Standard German, both with 128 million speakers as first or second languages, but does not include Arabic or Urdu.
Urdu ranks 11th at (126 million).
Arabic is treated as a collection of dialect languages, with those knowing classical Arabic forming a lingua franca of multinational elites (100 million).
Chinese treated as a familiy with Mandarin 1st with 1.052 billion speakers, Wu at 13th (77 million) and Yue at 17th (71 million).
Yue is Cantonese; Wu is spoken in the west IIRC.
I was a bit surprised that Urdu wasn’t in the top 10.
My wrong guesses included French, German, Urdu, and Swahili. If the estimates of 150 million Swahili speakers are correct, that should put it in the top 10—more than Punjabi, Russian, or Japanese.
This list puts German in the top 10. I totally forgot about Bengali and didn’t get Punjabi. Did pick Swahili. Using this list and using total number of people speaking the language, it looks like French does make the top 10. Who would have guessed that English is one of the official languages of Saint Kitts and Nevis as we all as Micronesia?
http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm
There are a lot of Indian languages listed in the top 50, so its possible Urdu would rise higher if third languages were included.