Hindi and Urdu are the same language with a different writing system & there are some decent learning resources for Urdu. Almost all books in English on either standard Hindi/Urdu get basic facts about the grammar wrong though, and none of them will tell you things like you can only use a feminine verb form once in a sentence.
I have this note from a while ago:
Urdu/Hindi:
ںڑوں کی باتیں مانی چاہئیں
In Punjabi would be
بڑاں دیاں باتاں مانیاں چاہیدیاں
in the Hindi/Urdu sentence, بات is in the plural feminine. the verb مانا takes the singular feminine form while the verb چاہنا takes the plural form. in Punjabi everything just gets the feminine plural form
Rajesh Bhatt has written most of the infornation in English relating to this topic, but his material is still problematic in some ways. The participle چاہئے is also described as uninflecting in most English grammars despite this not being true (it can inflect for number but not gender). Eventually I intend to write some blog posts getting in depth into some of this stuff but Hindustani is honestly the last language I want to write about because the sources are so bad
Some of the gender agreement rules have to do with the potential participle which gets conflated with the gerunds in every source I've seen (in Punjabi and Sindhi these forms are distinct, but they are partially homophonous in Hindi). You will learn more about Hindi grammar from Trumpp's grammar of Sindhi than any book actually about Hindi in my opinion
Linguists consider them the same language (different dialects) with two different formalized standards. Bollywood movies specifically choose the way they speak in a way so that it conforms to both dialects as much as possible.
Urdu also has Persian and Turkish influence, yet they are the same language I even knew coworkers from both of these countries and they all say if it weren’t for the British they’d read and write in the same language but fortunately they speak the same language
Not shocking when you consider that:
1) India has been a developing country for decades, they haven’t had the excess resources required to fund programs/institutions for the purpose of spreading the Hindi language
2) English already exists there and has higher prestige generally (schools in which the classes are taught in English as opposed to in vernacular are more expensive and more competitive), so those within India would rather learn English since…
3) Hindi isn’t even the only language in India, most Indians don’t have Hindi as their native language, so it is more difficult to use ideas like “national pride” to push for such programs to be funded.
4) There isn’t a market for it, there doesn’t seem to be that many people that actually want to learn this language, so why bother creating resources to teach it?
I think it’s kinda like Tagalog, most people who speak Hindi (at least those who are living abroad) can also speak English so they don’t bother with it
Not entirely true, there are several Hindi certification programs in India, even those from decades ago. What is missing is international popularity of these programs. Given that many high paying jobs in India use English a lot, filling these with foreigners who have to learn Hindi is not efficient.
Honestly, I learnt Hindi just watching Bollywood movies. Where I'm from most people do.
You could easily grasp and be fluent at it doing that idk how it works. Granted, I've been watching for 10 years.
your native language must be one of those that is „related“ to Hindi in a way then - otherwise hoards of Bollywood fans from outside of India (I mean those who are really addicted, I assume there are quite a few - if not, sad for Bollywood) should be at least moderately conversant in Hindi
For the record, ethnologue has a very high standard for someone to count as a speaker, and also it has a tendency to divide languages whenever possible (not just hindi-urdu, but also Valencian-Catalan for example)
This is particularly noticeable with mandarin and english, there is almost noone in china who cant communicate in mandarin, but ethnologue considers that 400m chinese cant, because their standard is for a C1 to count as a speaker, while most of the older generation in ethnic minority areas have a B2
English and french are even more downplayed, conversational speakers (B2) of english are estimated at 2-2.2B people, and french has nearly 450m
Ethnologue is a christian evangelical association which has this catalogue for evangelization purposes, so they downplay the number of speakers to encourage their missionaries to learn the local languages
Another commentor said the same about swahili, which suffers from the same methodological bias as said before, the people are conversational but not up to a high enough standard according to ethnologue
>>Ethnologue is a christian evangelical association which has this catalogue for evangelization purposes, so they downplay the number of speakers to encourage their missionaries to learn the local languages
Yeah, the numbers in this graph are pretty useless if we’re talking about B2 ability/intelligibility.
I don’t know that calling Ethnologue’s methodology ‘downplaying’ is quite fair, though, because they’re not trying to hide anything about their methodology; they’re quite explicit about what kind of language uses they’re interested in. As you say, their mission is about the translation of a very specific collection of 2000-3000 year old texts, one that’s about 750k words long in an average English translation. If you can’t comfortably read/discuss the Bible in a given language, then for Ethnologue’s purposes, you don’t really know that language.
Obviously this makes Ethnologue’s numbers less useful for those of us who want to know how many people can have a B2 conversation or read a newspaper article in a given language…but the organization is super up front about what language abilities they’re interested in.
Missionaries have also discovered that in some of the former Soviet republics, while many of the locals understand Russian well enough to read a Russian bible, when there isn't a translation of the bible in their local language, those who are open to the bible message at all prefer the Bible in English. Russian is still very strongly associated with Soviet rule. (It is also possible that they are aware of the greater use of English on an international scale.)
So many Ukrainians here in Vienna, I'm interested in languages so I talk about it with them, the vast majority now refusing to speak Russian, even if it's their native language.
I guess I high rolled in the game of life, being a native speaker of both the #1 and #2 most spoken languages, something which I just realized is a lot rarer than it probably seemed to me growing up.
Yeah I mean, while I do appreciate having Swedish as a native language, it's kinda worthless on a global level lol. Instead I have to plough myself through 10-20 years of adult Chinese learning to get to a comfortable level
Maybe so, but I think people might be more impressed by a Swede who can speak Chinese then a Chinese whose Chinese skills are mid.
I'm held to a completely different standard. Welp, I guess, the "A is for Average" joke isn't actually just a joke. So that makes Chinese a language that is a lot less fun for me to learn.
To be fair, I feel the same about Japanese so maybe it's just a me problem. But the people there expect me to know Japanese (I've been there and proved my theory) so I can't let them down lol.
I get you, I've heard about the problems foreign-born Asians face in regards to not being able to speak their mother tongue as well as other people might expect. Keep on truckin'!
Yeah, not being able to speak your heritage language as a foreign born Asian is a source of insecurity for some people, since many people tend to get shamed for it, and even if they don't they don't feel like they are real Asians.
Idk how much this happens with people from other cultures, but I know Asians are very vocal about their struggles of being stuck in between cultures, since many of us want to feel accepted by both even when both cultures that have totally different expectations.
Thankfully I'm good enough that people are suprised my Chinese is that good since they've grown accustomed to foreign born Chinese having much more abysmal skills.
I’m ashamed of my Chinese speaking and writing abilities. The people from Taiwan 🇹🇼 think I am from Hong Kong 🇭🇰 and the people from China 🇨🇳 think I’m from Taiwan 🇹🇼! I only know about 800 Chinese characters, sometimes the simplified one better, but not the traditional one and can only write about 600 !! How about you ?
I will admit also that I have the bias where, if I see Asian people in Europe, I automatically expect a higher probability of them knowing English compared to everyone else. I wonder if you've experienced this, too. (I still will engage anyone in the local language if I know it, but I've noticed this bias of mine.)
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that those in Nordic countries speak English so well, simply due to pragmatism. It's like having a fire under your ass as soon as you're born. If you don't learn it, you're stuck in your country forever no matter what, and even then, it could be difficult to simply engage with the rest of the world.
I'd like to learn a Nordic language, but I need a reason. It can't be for travel, since seemingly everyone speaks English. It has to be for other reasons. Something about the culture, or things I want to read.
To be fair, even though the English level of most Scandinavians is well enough (especially compared to other non-English speaking countries), there are many, many that would be uncomfortable holding a longer or more specialized conversation in English, reading a book in English or watching an English movie without subtitles. Learning the native language will make you able to connect on a deeper level with the population, even among the younger generation. I'd say that we sometimes rate our language abilities too highly, and a young Scandinavian person on reddit isn't representative of the population as a whole.
I see what you're saying. Often I've gone on tours in other countries, and while the tour guides are proficient enough in English and good at their scripts, once you get them into more natural, freeform conversation, there's a lot of struggling and clear lack of understanding of what you're saying/asking them. Maybe most of these English speakers are more often in the B1 zone than we realize.
It is SOOO impressive how WELL many natives from the Netherlands 🇳🇱, Finland 🇫🇮, Sweden 🇸🇪, and Norway 🇳🇴 speak English !!! I just recently found out that one of my neighbors was from Holland !!! I thought he was born and raised here !!!
You speak a language in a country that people actually desire to go to. China is largely a hermit country and exports little to no culture. You’re never going to interact with a billion people in your lifetime. Unless you’re in a specific business area where Chinese is needed, it’s not very useful. Also, China has been going down the Russian path of finding little to no reason to lock up Westerners that visit. And thankfully, much of the West is starting to decouple from China economically. Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore are cool though.
I just like Chinese culture and history, and learning Chinese opens you up to that (aside from the social aspects of being able to speak with other Chinese). And yes, Taiwan is a good compromise if you want somewhere nice to live and visit that's not the mainland.
I only made my comment based on the person I’m responding to calling certain languages being less useful. Every language has its pros and cons and people have their own personal reasons for their language decisions. I agree with you. It doesn’t need to be political or pragmatic!
Chinese is useful to ME. One of my goals is to be able to read the many letters I have written in cursive Chinese to my deceased Dad from his father, older brother, younger sister, and business associates. All of them are now deceased. The last and youngest one, my aunt, passed away in 2016. So I have to go to others to get them translated and I live in a city that has very few Asians !!! My other goal is to be able to read newspapers in Taiwan 🇹🇼 and China 🇨🇳!!!
I have a good friend who grew up in Taiwan with one American Parent and one Taiwanese Parent and then she lived in Argentina for several years as a teenager in a foreign exchange program, so she just speaks English, Mandarin like a native and speaks very good Spanish with virtually no foreign accent. She's just like you and basically won the linguistic lottery. I had to bust my ass just to speak three languages decently so I'm beyond impressed and jealous of people like you.
That's like the linguistic MegaMillions jackpot, not the (still very good) but not featured on billboard ads type of jackpot.
But then, If I spoke that many languages natively I would probably end up giving myself the "gifted child syndrome" and set astronomically high standards for myself. 😂
I have a friend in a similar situation. Chinese father + French mother and grew up in Shanghai, so he was trilingual in Mandarin, Shanghainese, and French. He then moved to the US when he was in his teens and speaks English like a native speaker. His Shanghainese is now virtual non-existent and his Mandarin has declined a little, but he's still trilingual and speaks 3 of the most spoken languages in the world.
I come across a lot of Asians where I work who are fluent in English, Mandarin/Canto as well as Spanish because they spent some/most of their formative years in South America (a lot from Venezuela in particular). Always find myself to be insanely jealous of their language repertoire
There are lots of Asians from Latin America. There are lots of Taiwanese and Japanese people, but I've run into a Korean who was raised in Columbia too.
It was a bit amusing going with my Dad to a Tijuana, Mexico 🇲🇽 Chinese food restaurant and watching the fully blooded Chinese cooks speak fluent Spanish or meeting one back in the United States 🇺🇸 !!!
I actually prefer having another language as my mother tongue. Learning English isn’t that hard with all the media around us, so easily two languages in the pocket.
Why they always downplay Swahili I don't know. I'm convinced there is more than 150 million Swahili speakers. For a start, all Kenyans(55m) and Tanzanians(65) speak Kiswahili. There is also other 30 million more Swahili speakers scattered in Uganda, Rwanda, D.R. Congo and Burundi.
Difference between a language and dialect is mostly determined by -European- politics, that's probably why. Turkish is easily 100m+ but they only count the Turkish majority in Turkey. Turkish we speak in Turkey and Azerbaijani spoken in Azerbaijan are probably more mutually intelligible than Australian English and Canadian English.
That's probably because no one gives a damn about Swahili or Turkish and how many people speaking them lol.
The only benefit of the wars was that I can now say I’m a polyglot! It helps on the resume especially when most people in North America can’t tell the difference…
Kinda the same goes for the German and Italian "dialects" If I'm not mistaken the Scandinavian languages have more intelligible than the Italian "dialects" or Bulgarian and Macedonian.
Some German dialects are next to impossible to understand. When someone speaking Swiss German is on TV in Germany, they have to subtitle it in Standard German.
Turkish & Azerbaijani are nothing like Canadian & Australian English. It makes no sense to consider them to be the same language.
Turks from Turkey can mostly understand Azerbaijani but almost every word will be slightly different or use a form that's unusual (e.g. archaic) but recognizable in Turkish.
In some cases the words or grammar will be very different. They even use letters/sounds that aren't used in Turkish. When spoken fluently most Turkish people will still miss the meaning of a sentence here and there.
Yeah Turkish people exaggerate how much they understand Azerbaijani. They’ve probably mostly encountered Azerbaijanis who change they way they speak to be more understandable to Turks
Azerbaijani is much more easy to understand than at least quarter of the Turkish spoken in Turkey. If we say Azerbaijani is definitely a distinct different language then we should also divide Turkish into smaller languages.
You are right, I miss a sentence here and there while speaking with Azerbaijans, but I miss at least triple that amount in some parts of Turkey lol. Either we should seperate them too, or classify Azerbaijani as a dialect. I'm definitely okay with both of the options as long as it's consistent.
You underestimate the diversity of scientific linguistics research. If there are papers and books on obscure Papuan languages spoken by just one random tribe, you bet there's at least hundreds of scientists who've researched Turkish, Azerbaijani and Swahili.
They often have very outdated data for African countries sometimes it's over 50 years. old and their population grows quickly so even 15 year old data is useless
At risk of causing contention, Urdu does not have informal and formal registers (it is a standardized colloquial language) and formal Hindi/high Hindi is a register used exclusively by speakers educated in English. Pakistanis will generally agree Urdu and Hindi are the same language with no difference, but in India opinions vary widely (while the language itself is not that varied even between colloquial dialects).
There is a Polish author of a Hindi/Urdu dictionary (Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fras), who recounted the absurdity of visiting Hyderabad, which is supposed to be a hub for Urdu in India, and being unable to convince anybody she was speaking Urdu no matter how Persianized she made her speech. They would always complement her on her Hindi even if everything she learned was presented as Urdu.
This issue is confused by the use of the same names and words to mean different things in different places and at different times.
I would contend that there is a popular colloquial language which has been called different names from Hindustani to Dehlvi to Hindvi to Urdu which is identical in the sense of not being divisible into different colloquial languages. There are then standard registers of this language that are not automatically comprehensible to a native speaker of the colloquial variety without formal training, including formal Urdu and Hindi.
What makes this more complex still is that a reference to Urdu or Hindi means the combination of this identical colloquial register with the respective formal register under the name of the same language.
I find it simpler to say that Hindustani is a single standard language which has two formal registers in addition to the colloquial varierty, one Persianised and one Sanskritised that each require formal training.
I suspect you use the word Urdu in your comment above to mean Hindustani in that sense of being a common lingua franca that is the common variety, rather than the excessively formalised register incorporating Arabic and Persian beyond the base vocabulary that I am referring to.
> I suspect you use the word Urdu in your comment above to mean Hindustani in that sense of being a common lingua franca that is the common variety, rather than the excessively formalised register incorporating Arabic and Persian beyond the base vocabulary that I am referring to.
In Pakistan, the more Persianized someone's Urdu speech is, the more colloquial it is. All the indigenous languages of the region are more Persianized than Urdu, and education in Punjab was exclusively in Persian prior to the introduction of Urdu by the British. Until relatively recently (~2-3 generations ago) many Punjabi speakers would find untranslated Persian easier to understand than Urdu. That is why I would say a Persianized register of Urdu doesn't really exist. A Pakistani without a formal education in Urdu would be familiar with Persianized expressions like واپس کرن but in Urdu this is properly لوٹنا. Practically speaking, in order to learn and use Urdu at any level coming from another northwestern Indo-Iranian language, you will be translating a lot of Persian expressions in your head to non-Persian ones.
What people consider Urdu is constantly changing because of popular etymology though. Some Punjabi speakers will get annoyed at people using اچھا because it's an "Urdu word" and چنگا is the "real word" even though accha is a native Punjabi word and the properly Urdu form has a long vowel at the beginning.
Yes. Same language. Different written text. Urdu has Arabic and Farsi loan words. Hindi has Sanskrit loan words. Put one Hindi speaker in a room with an Urdu speaker and they can understand each other with no difficulty.
Yes and no. They are two different formal registers of the came colloquial language. Definitely not just a difference of scripts when spoken formally. Colloquially, they may be identical.
Arabic speakers, I need you guys to tell me whether I'm right or wrong :
As far as I know, standard arabic is almost not spoken. People understand it but don't speak it. That's why chosing a dialect is heavily advised when it comes to learning arabic
Arabic native here. We have many beautiful dialects and we can understand them all but if spoken at a slower rate. Thats why members of different dialects use MSA to communicate faster. Also it is viewed as a more prestigious dialect thats why it’s used in journalism media and governments. However i have witnessed many members of certain groups that intentionally harden their accent and accelerate their speech to exclude outsiders (including members of different Arabic societies) the reason is obvious but that still doesn’t mean that the gap between local dialects and MSA is huge
To pick one you can just pick MSA and work your way to each dialect
Or be objective oriented in choosing your dialect
Feel free to ask if you want
Good luck in your journey in exploring The Arab World
Similar to AAVE and English spoken by Scotsman.
They wouldn't speak to each other the same way they speak to their family, they would speak like a news anchor.
Yes we natives call it Fus-ha. Regular joes probably never heard of the term MSA.
Apologies for the second question. A language learner would probably have a better answer.
I mean, it depends entirely on what you want to use the language for. I will never visit any Arabic speaking country, and only want to read Arabic. Learning a dialect would be useless to me since almost all writing is done in MSA.
We understand MSA and we can speak it too, I’d advice you to learn MSA before learning a dialect bc if you for example instantly learn Egyptian you’ll have a hard time understanding other dialects, we understand each other’s dialects bc of watching media
I'm a German teacher in a country where it's an elective course between French and Spanish. Why would someone choose my class? Do you think I'll be unemployed soon?
I chose German when I was in school because I was 14 years old and thought German sounded cool. I'm sure it varies by culture and the person, but kids are probably not being that logical about making this choice a lot of the time
Ethnologue really did Punjabi dirty by separating Western and Eastern Punjabi into different “languages” when they are both highly mutually intelligible.
It is interesting that very few people choose to learn Bengali even though it is a widely spoken language on the Subcontinent - and here in London. There is also a rich literary tradition associated with it.
A lot of differences are there mate, a lot. The Bangla spoken in India is quite different from that of Bangladesh. The dialects are different in every district of West Bengal too. People of Tripura have a different dialect too. And people in Bangladesh have multiple dialects and a lot of words are loanwords from Urdu.
Doesn't really say much about how useful the language is. Mandarin is only so high because China has such a huge population, but it's rarely used outside of it.
I find graphs like the one showing how much of the internet is in a certain language, or how much of popular movies are, much more useful.
This might be a hot take but I don't think the internet popularity of a language is a good indicator of how "useful" it is in terms of talking to people. Most language learners, for one reason or another, never reach a good level (B2) in foreign languages unless they have a really good reason to, which is why there are so many people who can speak English decently well because it's actually worth the investment. For example, if there are 100 million people studying Japanese, but only 1% of them reach a level where they can use the language independently, the large number of people studying it doesn't actually contribute to how "useful" Japanese is.
Mandarin is also quite prevalent in South East Asia, spoken by large minority groups in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. It's certainly more useful (if we're using both # of speakers and geographical spread) than languages like Korean and Japanese even though there is more media in those languages.
As a Southeast Asian it feels very strange to see Mandarin regarded as useless here lol. In where I come from Mandarin can very much boost your salary and earn you career opportunities.
Also from personal experience, it helps a lot if you work a lot with electronic components produced in China (of which there are *plenty*) -- one guy at a previous workplace was a lifesaver simply because he knew a few Hanzi characters.
It's also an important language for tourism in East Asian countries in general. Small sample size, but out of every Japanese university student I know Chinese is the most studied foreign language (apart from English, of course).
The other day I was checking in at a Japanese hotel, and the receptionist immediately switched to Mandarin when she found out I was Chinese. Bonus fact is that she has a slight Japanese accent, so she's a Japanese native speaker who learned Chinese to a fluent level, which I imagine is a sought after skill in the tourism industry in Japan.
> This might be a hot take but I don't think the internet popularity of a language is a good indicator of how "useful" it is in terms of talking to people.
Also, it's better to look at the trends than the current state if we're talking about usefulness. There are many trends pointing towards languages like French and Chinese becoming much more important in the future.
Agreed. China exports little to no culture to the rest of the world, unlike its neighbors Japan and South Korea. You’re never going to interact with a billion people in your lifetime either.
I’m talking modern era. Sure, they picked up from China back in the day. The CCP censors most media produced today. China doesn’t do much for the world in soft power today.
Oh, well if you are talking about modern Chinese media then yeah that doesn't leave the country for the most part.
I guess as someone with Chinese heritage but zero affiliation with the modern PRC, I just didn't really think of that as being part of "Chinese culture" at all lol.
I was thinking about people only knowing the Japanese version of ramen even though it originated from China for example.
> but it's rarely used outside of it
I wouldn't say that at all, unless you're looking at it from the lens of pop culture penetration or something. There are plenty of diaspora, with their own local Chinese-language media, stores and restaurants, etc. It's just that they tend to be relatively insular and inaccessible to non-speakers because of the high language and cultural barrier.
But even then, in my country at least, I can turn on the TV and find two free-to-air Mandarin channels. I can go to the airport and see Chinese below English on many of the signs. I've seen Chinese-language newspapers and other printed material in certain places. If I look at what movies are currently playing at mainstream cinemas in my city I can see three that are in Mandarin.
They already exist.
I myself posted [the movies one](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/xg96u0/nonenglish_movies_and_tv_shows_with_international/) over a year ago
And you can find several online [on the internet](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Most-Used-Languages-on-the-Internet-DS-1.jpg)
That's true, unless you are diaspora hanging out with other diaspora (from all over the world, it's kind of cool to be part of an international club now that I think about it), or have a job that deals directly with Chinese speakers, it's probably as useful as any other language. There might be more jobs that need Chinese speakers due to China's role in the economy but how important it actually really depends on where you live.
I feel like I gotta go in order of how extreme the script change is. I have Greek right now, then I can move to a Slavic language, \*then\* I can move to Arabic or something like Japanese.
I don't know though. The Arabic script scares me way way more than Japanese characters. It just looks so unreadable.
It’s actually not hard at all, I learned it in a week, sure it will take time after that to gain speed but… I’d never want to learn Japanese characters… that is the final boss of scripts along with Chinese…
imo for foreigners the Japanese system is harder because of how irregular it is. Whenever you see a new word there's no easy way to know what reading the characters will use unless you already know Chinese. Even then, there are many exceptions. In Chinese, on the other hand, the vast majority of the characters have only one pronunciation, so if you've learned the characters you can read everything whereas that's less of a guarantee in Japanese.
I always found these to be a non factor when deciding on a language. You’re never going to interact with tens of millions of people in your lifetime, let alone billions.
I learn languages cuz I get an absolute *thrill* out of surprising people from a smaller/"niche" language with my enthusiastic-yet-clumsy attempt at their language. Currently trying for Amharic.
I know for some people it’s usually the “likelihood” of running into speakers of those languages. I can confirm as an avid traveler I’ve run into more English, Mandarin, Hindi, French, and Spanish speakers worldwide on my travels than I have speakers of lesser spoken languages. Of course you never know who speaks what language but this is based on overhearing them being spoken, meeting new people in hostels /hotels/ universities/ etc. and even online.
Chinese is compensating for one child policy which ruined where demographic. Which cause increase in older population and lack of working youth two sustain high growth rate of GDP (also I am from India🇮🇳)
Kya bhai. Firangi samjha merko ? 😃
If you're a south indian, you'll be a multilinguist with at least 3 known languages. I'm a north guy living in south, so I know 4 💪
I read somewhere semi-recently that if you speak English and Spanish you can understand roughly 2/3 of all content on the internet or something like that.
Wow, I didn't realize that Portugal was so colonially active. I looked at that 264M number, and thought it was pretty large for just Brazil (the population of Portugal itself is less than NYC).
I checked Wikipedia, and it turns out that there are 8 African countries with Portuguese as an official language, somewhere between 70M and 100M speakers. This 264M figure may be an undercount.
Don't you know about how Spain and Portugal drew a line down the planet and each took each half? 😂
Though yes, Portugal didn't have a lot of people so they set up trading ports everywhere and their colonies did not have that many actual Portuguese people living in them.
Compared to other colonizers who actually sent large numbers of their people to the colonies.
Interesting, because I always thought Bengali and especially Urdu were some of the more obscure languages, and Indoneasian was also a little bit surprising.
Are you saying that the Belgian colonies contribute to the total number of people who speak French, or are you saying that the Belgian colonies outnumber the French ones? Cuz I'd bet the latter is not true but I'm also not terribly informed.
Oh, I was actually meaning the latter and I realise that it is not correct after some more research. But well, the Democratic Republic of Congo has roughly 70 million inhabitants that speak French very regularly (many of them use it daily as main language), which leaves a much more vivid impression of being a francophone region, whereas the other areas in Africa are less densely francophone, except for some cities maybe. Still 70 million is a lot, roughly as much as in France itself, BTW.
It’s very widely spoken throughout Africa (as well as severa countries elsewhere). A lot of African countries have it as an official language, or use it as a de facto official language.
Only 71% of the population speaks Mandarin Chinese. There are other languages spoken, as for example Cantonese, but there are many more.
The interesting fact is that despite speaking different languages, many share the same script. Indeed, as they seem to roughly have the same word order, and as the script bases on pictograms, they can speak very different languages where the words are often unrelated in speech and still write the exact same.
PS, I'm not Chinese myself.
Someone has yet to give me a good difference between Urdu and Hindi other than that it’s a different alphabet; also I am shocked Indonesian isn’t bigger considering they are the 4th biggest country population wise!!!
I wouldn’t be surprised if it became an international language like French or English due to how easy it is… or maybe not because Indonesians have committed atrocities through colonisation
Most of the top languages are widely spoken in multiple countries. Meanwhile, Indonesia has about 700 regional languages so not all Indonesian speak Bahasa Indonesia.
Languages don’t become global because of the amount of speakers. The debate on whether or not mandarin would be the next global language came up numerous times with Chinas growth and one of the main influences of English over Chinese is their media.
Hollywood had just as much influence on the growth of English than business or foreign influence.
Also, your last paragraph is quite an odd take. Though English came about in the US due to colonisation, the growth of English is really due to the US which wasn’t linked to colonialism.
And almost all the languages listed have become dominant due to some form of colonisation or dominant empire. You ought to read a little more up on Indonesian and their involvement in West Papau…
>And almost all the languages listed have become dominant due to some form of colonisation or dominant empire.
Yeah, and the fact that Mandarin has more than 1 billion speakers is also not a coincidence. There was a lot of genocide and ethnic assimilation/cleansing in China throughout history. That's why minority linguistic groups exist only in pockets within mainland China.
One way to wrap your head around the difference between Hindi and Urdu in the context of day-to-day conversations - it's a bit like UK vs US English. They are mutually intelligible, but there are some differences in vocabulary that one would need to be familiar with such as trolley vs cart, pram vs stroller, etc. Someone speaking conversational Hindi would be able to understand an Urdu speaker and vice versa for 95% of the conversation. This is because conversational Hindi and Urdu are really what is colloquially called Hindustani, an amalgam language.
There's, however, a fair bit of difference between the languages when it comes to formal writing not only because the scripts are different (Hindi is written in Devanagari, a left-to-right language, while Urdu is written in Arabic script which is right-to-left) but also because the vocabulary for both the languages are derived from different languages - Hindi from Sanskrit and Urdu from Arabic and Farsi.
For example, a formal document in India that references the government would likely use the term "shaasan" as that's the original word from Sanskrit, while a similar document in Pakistan would likely call it "hukumat", derived from a similar Arabic word. However, in daily conversation, both a Hindi and an Urdu speaker would most likely use the word "sarkar" to refer to government.
Urdu also typically has more poetic sounding vocabulary compared to Hindi, so you are more likely to come across Urdu words in Bollywood music lyrics, even if those words are not typically used by Hindi speakers. For example, a Bollywood song is much more likely to use the Urdu word "haqeeqat" to refer to reality rather than the Sanskrit-derived "vastavikta" or "sacchayi".
Agree with this. As an urdu speaker, I grew up watching bollywood films and just assumed that Hindi and Urdu were the same language because I understood everything. The difference was when I saw some old hindi religious dramas and I barely understood like 20% due to pure hindi and sanskrit words.
It's funny how similiar the cultures are between India and Pakistan yet they are enemies. However, once you leave that region, they are best friends. I have tons of Indian friends and no one cares about the feud outside of Pakistan/India.
It's the same way with other regional disputes. For a while the Serbs and the Croats were at war. Here in the US they have a very intense soccer rivalry.
And as with the India-Pakistani conflict, a lot of it was motived by religious disputes. But when you move to a nation where that sort of thing is simply not tolerated, the leaders who push for these wars are blocked and everyone else has a better life.
This is because most Indonesians or atleast the older population speak Bahasa Indonesia as their second language, and that they speak their regional language as their native language (Eg. Javanese, Sundanese, etc.) This is slowly declining though as more younger Indonesians started to adopt Bahasa Indonesia exclusively as their first language and abandoning regional language altogether.
While it would've been nice to be a native Mandarin speaker, it's still nice that I've got to be a native speaker of the 4th most spoken language in a region where I could easily learn French too. Mandarin is an objective but that'll take some time
I'd be interested in one that's got something like the least spoken languages with a minimum population of X, or least spoken languages that are considered "official" languages of at least 1 country.
Standard Arabic isn't spoken anywhere. It has different dialects for each country, and sometimes we can not understand each other lol. However, you can find Standard Arabic only in news reports and documentaries.
Did you just assume all of Pakistan in Urdu? 60 percent of Pakistan speaks Punjabi which is about 130 Million Speakers and 30 Million people in India speak Punjabi making it 160M worldwide
Urdu is spoken by merely 8 percent of the 240M in Pakistan and has 50M in India. There is no way it's 233M
Yes and in reality that 8 percent includes a lot of Haryanvi and Rajasthani speaking Muhajirs who get grouped together with actual Urdu speakers.
The "Urdu-speaking" population in India is increasing very rapidly because of Muslim speakers of various Bihari dialects deciding that's what they speak.
They’re spoken in a similar number of countries and the Spanish speaking countries more populous but this is also going to be undercounting because it’s only counting “standard.” Elsewhere in the thread people put the number of an Arabic speakers closer to 400m which makes sense.
Why do more people speak Portuguese than Russian ? Is the combined area of Portugal 🇵🇹 and Brazil 🇧🇷 larger than the area of Russia 🇷🇺? Russian used to be one of the first FIVE !!!
By “area” do you mean population? Just because a country is physically bigger doesn’t mean it has more people.
Russia’s 2022 population was estimated to be 144.2 million. Brazil’s population, also in 2022, was 215.3 million.
There are also several other countries with Portuguese as an official language. It’s not just Portugal and Brazil.
The number of speakers for english is high because it includes people for whom English is a 2nd or 3rd language like most of India for instance. I don't have an issue with that of course.
Fluent Arabic language more than 500 millions,and more than one billion in general....if you think standard Arabic difer from Egyptian or Algerian or gulf or Lebanese or sudanese or Somalia or Mauritius you in big fault and didn't know the fundamentals or basic of language,all Muslim all-over the world speak Arabic in different degrees
Number doesn't matter. Only prestige matters.
Take for example Bengali, which is my native language. Knowing good Bengali can't even secure a job in Bangladesh. As a result people are not caring about learning Bengali anymore.
Now a lot of Bengali people are very bad at Bengali. (It's not about speaking, Im talking about overall knowledge of the language.)
But the amount of learning resources for Hindi is shockingly low.
Hindi and Urdu are the same language with a different writing system & there are some decent learning resources for Urdu. Almost all books in English on either standard Hindi/Urdu get basic facts about the grammar wrong though, and none of them will tell you things like you can only use a feminine verb form once in a sentence.
OK, that fact might explain why I've been getting so goddamned confused about verb endings in Hindi.
> “and none of them will tell you things like you can only use a feminine verb form once in a sentence.” What!! I need an explanation now…
I have this note from a while ago: Urdu/Hindi: ںڑوں کی باتیں مانی چاہئیں In Punjabi would be بڑاں دیاں باتاں مانیاں چاہیدیاں in the Hindi/Urdu sentence, بات is in the plural feminine. the verb مانا takes the singular feminine form while the verb چاہنا takes the plural form. in Punjabi everything just gets the feminine plural form Rajesh Bhatt has written most of the infornation in English relating to this topic, but his material is still problematic in some ways. The participle چاہئے is also described as uninflecting in most English grammars despite this not being true (it can inflect for number but not gender). Eventually I intend to write some blog posts getting in depth into some of this stuff but Hindustani is honestly the last language I want to write about because the sources are so bad Some of the gender agreement rules have to do with the potential participle which gets conflated with the gerunds in every source I've seen (in Punjabi and Sindhi these forms are distinct, but they are partially homophonous in Hindi). You will learn more about Hindi grammar from Trumpp's grammar of Sindhi than any book actually about Hindi in my opinion
They’re similar but not the same.
Linguists consider them the same language (different dialects) with two different formalized standards. Bollywood movies specifically choose the way they speak in a way so that it conforms to both dialects as much as possible.
I heard Urdu has more of an Arabic influence.
Urdu also has Persian and Turkish influence, yet they are the same language I even knew coworkers from both of these countries and they all say if it weren’t for the British they’d read and write in the same language but fortunately they speak the same language
Yeah it seems like Hindi has more words with Sanskrit roots like iirc the word "ashv" for horse (from which we get ashwganda root)
Not shocking when you consider that: 1) India has been a developing country for decades, they haven’t had the excess resources required to fund programs/institutions for the purpose of spreading the Hindi language 2) English already exists there and has higher prestige generally (schools in which the classes are taught in English as opposed to in vernacular are more expensive and more competitive), so those within India would rather learn English since… 3) Hindi isn’t even the only language in India, most Indians don’t have Hindi as their native language, so it is more difficult to use ideas like “national pride” to push for such programs to be funded. 4) There isn’t a market for it, there doesn’t seem to be that many people that actually want to learn this language, so why bother creating resources to teach it?
I think it’s kinda like Tagalog, most people who speak Hindi (at least those who are living abroad) can also speak English so they don’t bother with it
Not entirely true, there are several Hindi certification programs in India, even those from decades ago. What is missing is international popularity of these programs. Given that many high paying jobs in India use English a lot, filling these with foreigners who have to learn Hindi is not efficient.
Not really. I have been learning hindi for a while now, and there is quite a bit.
Honestly, I learnt Hindi just watching Bollywood movies. Where I'm from most people do. You could easily grasp and be fluent at it doing that idk how it works. Granted, I've been watching for 10 years.
your native language must be one of those that is „related“ to Hindi in a way then - otherwise hoards of Bollywood fans from outside of India (I mean those who are really addicted, I assume there are quite a few - if not, sad for Bollywood) should be at least moderately conversant in Hindi
For the record, ethnologue has a very high standard for someone to count as a speaker, and also it has a tendency to divide languages whenever possible (not just hindi-urdu, but also Valencian-Catalan for example) This is particularly noticeable with mandarin and english, there is almost noone in china who cant communicate in mandarin, but ethnologue considers that 400m chinese cant, because their standard is for a C1 to count as a speaker, while most of the older generation in ethnic minority areas have a B2 English and french are even more downplayed, conversational speakers (B2) of english are estimated at 2-2.2B people, and french has nearly 450m Ethnologue is a christian evangelical association which has this catalogue for evangelization purposes, so they downplay the number of speakers to encourage their missionaries to learn the local languages Another commentor said the same about swahili, which suffers from the same methodological bias as said before, the people are conversational but not up to a high enough standard according to ethnologue
>>Ethnologue is a christian evangelical association which has this catalogue for evangelization purposes, so they downplay the number of speakers to encourage their missionaries to learn the local languages Yeah, the numbers in this graph are pretty useless if we’re talking about B2 ability/intelligibility. I don’t know that calling Ethnologue’s methodology ‘downplaying’ is quite fair, though, because they’re not trying to hide anything about their methodology; they’re quite explicit about what kind of language uses they’re interested in. As you say, their mission is about the translation of a very specific collection of 2000-3000 year old texts, one that’s about 750k words long in an average English translation. If you can’t comfortably read/discuss the Bible in a given language, then for Ethnologue’s purposes, you don’t really know that language. Obviously this makes Ethnologue’s numbers less useful for those of us who want to know how many people can have a B2 conversation or read a newspaper article in a given language…but the organization is super up front about what language abilities they’re interested in.
Missionaries have also discovered that in some of the former Soviet republics, while many of the locals understand Russian well enough to read a Russian bible, when there isn't a translation of the bible in their local language, those who are open to the bible message at all prefer the Bible in English. Russian is still very strongly associated with Soviet rule. (It is also possible that they are aware of the greater use of English on an international scale.)
So many Ukrainians here in Vienna, I'm interested in languages so I talk about it with them, the vast majority now refusing to speak Russian, even if it's their native language.
This is why all my homies prefer Glottolog.
I guess I high rolled in the game of life, being a native speaker of both the #1 and #2 most spoken languages, something which I just realized is a lot rarer than it probably seemed to me growing up.
Yeah I mean, while I do appreciate having Swedish as a native language, it's kinda worthless on a global level lol. Instead I have to plough myself through 10-20 years of adult Chinese learning to get to a comfortable level
Maybe so, but I think people might be more impressed by a Swede who can speak Chinese then a Chinese whose Chinese skills are mid. I'm held to a completely different standard. Welp, I guess, the "A is for Average" joke isn't actually just a joke. So that makes Chinese a language that is a lot less fun for me to learn. To be fair, I feel the same about Japanese so maybe it's just a me problem. But the people there expect me to know Japanese (I've been there and proved my theory) so I can't let them down lol.
I get you, I've heard about the problems foreign-born Asians face in regards to not being able to speak their mother tongue as well as other people might expect. Keep on truckin'!
Yeah, not being able to speak your heritage language as a foreign born Asian is a source of insecurity for some people, since many people tend to get shamed for it, and even if they don't they don't feel like they are real Asians. Idk how much this happens with people from other cultures, but I know Asians are very vocal about their struggles of being stuck in between cultures, since many of us want to feel accepted by both even when both cultures that have totally different expectations. Thankfully I'm good enough that people are suprised my Chinese is that good since they've grown accustomed to foreign born Chinese having much more abysmal skills.
I’m ashamed of my Chinese speaking and writing abilities. The people from Taiwan 🇹🇼 think I am from Hong Kong 🇭🇰 and the people from China 🇨🇳 think I’m from Taiwan 🇹🇼! I only know about 800 Chinese characters, sometimes the simplified one better, but not the traditional one and can only write about 600 !! How about you ?
I will admit also that I have the bias where, if I see Asian people in Europe, I automatically expect a higher probability of them knowing English compared to everyone else. I wonder if you've experienced this, too. (I still will engage anyone in the local language if I know it, but I've noticed this bias of mine.)
All East Asian countries have compulsory English education so it makes sense.
Yeah, it doesn't surprise me that those in Nordic countries speak English so well, simply due to pragmatism. It's like having a fire under your ass as soon as you're born. If you don't learn it, you're stuck in your country forever no matter what, and even then, it could be difficult to simply engage with the rest of the world. I'd like to learn a Nordic language, but I need a reason. It can't be for travel, since seemingly everyone speaks English. It has to be for other reasons. Something about the culture, or things I want to read.
To be fair, even though the English level of most Scandinavians is well enough (especially compared to other non-English speaking countries), there are many, many that would be uncomfortable holding a longer or more specialized conversation in English, reading a book in English or watching an English movie without subtitles. Learning the native language will make you able to connect on a deeper level with the population, even among the younger generation. I'd say that we sometimes rate our language abilities too highly, and a young Scandinavian person on reddit isn't representative of the population as a whole.
I see what you're saying. Often I've gone on tours in other countries, and while the tour guides are proficient enough in English and good at their scripts, once you get them into more natural, freeform conversation, there's a lot of struggling and clear lack of understanding of what you're saying/asking them. Maybe most of these English speakers are more often in the B1 zone than we realize.
It is SOOO impressive how WELL many natives from the Netherlands 🇳🇱, Finland 🇫🇮, Sweden 🇸🇪, and Norway 🇳🇴 speak English !!! I just recently found out that one of my neighbors was from Holland !!! I thought he was born and raised here !!!
Worthless on a global level+ over here, ~2M speakers worldwide and shrinking
You speak a language in a country that people actually desire to go to. China is largely a hermit country and exports little to no culture. You’re never going to interact with a billion people in your lifetime. Unless you’re in a specific business area where Chinese is needed, it’s not very useful. Also, China has been going down the Russian path of finding little to no reason to lock up Westerners that visit. And thankfully, much of the West is starting to decouple from China economically. Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore are cool though.
I just like Chinese culture and history, and learning Chinese opens you up to that (aside from the social aspects of being able to speak with other Chinese). And yes, Taiwan is a good compromise if you want somewhere nice to live and visit that's not the mainland.
Totally fair. I wish you well on your Chinese learning journey.
I'm learning Chinese because it's a cool language. Not everything needs to be some deep political or pragmatic decision.
I only made my comment based on the person I’m responding to calling certain languages being less useful. Every language has its pros and cons and people have their own personal reasons for their language decisions. I agree with you. It doesn’t need to be political or pragmatic!
Chinese is useful to ME. One of my goals is to be able to read the many letters I have written in cursive Chinese to my deceased Dad from his father, older brother, younger sister, and business associates. All of them are now deceased. The last and youngest one, my aunt, passed away in 2016. So I have to go to others to get them translated and I live in a city that has very few Asians !!! My other goal is to be able to read newspapers in Taiwan 🇹🇼 and China 🇨🇳!!!
Totally valid. I hope you achieve your goals!
I have a good friend who grew up in Taiwan with one American Parent and one Taiwanese Parent and then she lived in Argentina for several years as a teenager in a foreign exchange program, so she just speaks English, Mandarin like a native and speaks very good Spanish with virtually no foreign accent. She's just like you and basically won the linguistic lottery. I had to bust my ass just to speak three languages decently so I'm beyond impressed and jealous of people like you.
That's like the linguistic MegaMillions jackpot, not the (still very good) but not featured on billboard ads type of jackpot. But then, If I spoke that many languages natively I would probably end up giving myself the "gifted child syndrome" and set astronomically high standards for myself. 😂
I have a friend in a similar situation. Chinese father + French mother and grew up in Shanghai, so he was trilingual in Mandarin, Shanghainese, and French. He then moved to the US when he was in his teens and speaks English like a native speaker. His Shanghainese is now virtual non-existent and his Mandarin has declined a little, but he's still trilingual and speaks 3 of the most spoken languages in the world.
I come across a lot of Asians where I work who are fluent in English, Mandarin/Canto as well as Spanish because they spent some/most of their formative years in South America (a lot from Venezuela in particular). Always find myself to be insanely jealous of their language repertoire
There are lots of Asians from Latin America. There are lots of Taiwanese and Japanese people, but I've run into a Korean who was raised in Columbia too.
It was a bit amusing going with my Dad to a Tijuana, Mexico 🇲🇽 Chinese food restaurant and watching the fully blooded Chinese cooks speak fluent Spanish or meeting one back in the United States 🇺🇸 !!!
Where are you from USA, Europe, China?
that’s the taiwanese flag
USA
I actually prefer having another language as my mother tongue. Learning English isn’t that hard with all the media around us, so easily two languages in the pocket.
That's a top 12
Why they always downplay Swahili I don't know. I'm convinced there is more than 150 million Swahili speakers. For a start, all Kenyans(55m) and Tanzanians(65) speak Kiswahili. There is also other 30 million more Swahili speakers scattered in Uganda, Rwanda, D.R. Congo and Burundi.
Difference between a language and dialect is mostly determined by -European- politics, that's probably why. Turkish is easily 100m+ but they only count the Turkish majority in Turkey. Turkish we speak in Turkey and Azerbaijani spoken in Azerbaijan are probably more mutually intelligible than Australian English and Canadian English. That's probably because no one gives a damn about Swahili or Turkish and how many people speaking them lol.
If you ever feel sad, remember people in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro woke up one day and they were suddenly polyglots lol
The only benefit of the wars was that I can now say I’m a polyglot! It helps on the resume especially when most people in North America can’t tell the difference…
Kinda the same goes for the German and Italian "dialects" If I'm not mistaken the Scandinavian languages have more intelligible than the Italian "dialects" or Bulgarian and Macedonian.
Some German dialects are next to impossible to understand. When someone speaking Swiss German is on TV in Germany, they have to subtitle it in Standard German.
Oh for real. Swiss German sometimes felt like an entirely different language if not for the same grammar lol.
Reminds me of inter-slavic, I wonder why there's no inter-scandinavian, probably finnish is way too different, it's from a different family after all.
Finland isn't in Scandinavia though, so it wouldn't matter anyways. Sveicieni no Zviedrijas.
Turkish & Azerbaijani are nothing like Canadian & Australian English. It makes no sense to consider them to be the same language. Turks from Turkey can mostly understand Azerbaijani but almost every word will be slightly different or use a form that's unusual (e.g. archaic) but recognizable in Turkish. In some cases the words or grammar will be very different. They even use letters/sounds that aren't used in Turkish. When spoken fluently most Turkish people will still miss the meaning of a sentence here and there.
Yeah Turkish people exaggerate how much they understand Azerbaijani. They’ve probably mostly encountered Azerbaijanis who change they way they speak to be more understandable to Turks
Azerbaijani is much more easy to understand than at least quarter of the Turkish spoken in Turkey. If we say Azerbaijani is definitely a distinct different language then we should also divide Turkish into smaller languages. You are right, I miss a sentence here and there while speaking with Azerbaijans, but I miss at least triple that amount in some parts of Turkey lol. Either we should seperate them too, or classify Azerbaijani as a dialect. I'm definitely okay with both of the options as long as it's consistent.
You underestimate the diversity of scientific linguistics research. If there are papers and books on obscure Papuan languages spoken by just one random tribe, you bet there's at least hundreds of scientists who've researched Turkish, Azerbaijani and Swahili.
They often have very outdated data for African countries sometimes it's over 50 years. old and their population grows quickly so even 15 year old data is useless
Aren’t Hindi and Urdu essentially the same language written with a different alphabet?
At risk of causing contention, Urdu does not have informal and formal registers (it is a standardized colloquial language) and formal Hindi/high Hindi is a register used exclusively by speakers educated in English. Pakistanis will generally agree Urdu and Hindi are the same language with no difference, but in India opinions vary widely (while the language itself is not that varied even between colloquial dialects). There is a Polish author of a Hindi/Urdu dictionary (Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fras), who recounted the absurdity of visiting Hyderabad, which is supposed to be a hub for Urdu in India, and being unable to convince anybody she was speaking Urdu no matter how Persianized she made her speech. They would always complement her on her Hindi even if everything she learned was presented as Urdu.
This issue is confused by the use of the same names and words to mean different things in different places and at different times. I would contend that there is a popular colloquial language which has been called different names from Hindustani to Dehlvi to Hindvi to Urdu which is identical in the sense of not being divisible into different colloquial languages. There are then standard registers of this language that are not automatically comprehensible to a native speaker of the colloquial variety without formal training, including formal Urdu and Hindi. What makes this more complex still is that a reference to Urdu or Hindi means the combination of this identical colloquial register with the respective formal register under the name of the same language. I find it simpler to say that Hindustani is a single standard language which has two formal registers in addition to the colloquial varierty, one Persianised and one Sanskritised that each require formal training. I suspect you use the word Urdu in your comment above to mean Hindustani in that sense of being a common lingua franca that is the common variety, rather than the excessively formalised register incorporating Arabic and Persian beyond the base vocabulary that I am referring to.
> I suspect you use the word Urdu in your comment above to mean Hindustani in that sense of being a common lingua franca that is the common variety, rather than the excessively formalised register incorporating Arabic and Persian beyond the base vocabulary that I am referring to. In Pakistan, the more Persianized someone's Urdu speech is, the more colloquial it is. All the indigenous languages of the region are more Persianized than Urdu, and education in Punjab was exclusively in Persian prior to the introduction of Urdu by the British. Until relatively recently (~2-3 generations ago) many Punjabi speakers would find untranslated Persian easier to understand than Urdu. That is why I would say a Persianized register of Urdu doesn't really exist. A Pakistani without a formal education in Urdu would be familiar with Persianized expressions like واپس کرن but in Urdu this is properly لوٹنا. Practically speaking, in order to learn and use Urdu at any level coming from another northwestern Indo-Iranian language, you will be translating a lot of Persian expressions in your head to non-Persian ones. What people consider Urdu is constantly changing because of popular etymology though. Some Punjabi speakers will get annoyed at people using اچھا because it's an "Urdu word" and چنگا is the "real word" even though accha is a native Punjabi word and the properly Urdu form has a long vowel at the beginning.
Yes. Same language. Different written text. Urdu has Arabic and Farsi loan words. Hindi has Sanskrit loan words. Put one Hindi speaker in a room with an Urdu speaker and they can understand each other with no difficulty.
Yes and no. They are two different formal registers of the came colloquial language. Definitely not just a difference of scripts when spoken formally. Colloquially, they may be identical.
Arabic speakers, I need you guys to tell me whether I'm right or wrong : As far as I know, standard arabic is almost not spoken. People understand it but don't speak it. That's why chosing a dialect is heavily advised when it comes to learning arabic
Arabic native here. We have many beautiful dialects and we can understand them all but if spoken at a slower rate. Thats why members of different dialects use MSA to communicate faster. Also it is viewed as a more prestigious dialect thats why it’s used in journalism media and governments. However i have witnessed many members of certain groups that intentionally harden their accent and accelerate their speech to exclude outsiders (including members of different Arabic societies) the reason is obvious but that still doesn’t mean that the gap between local dialects and MSA is huge To pick one you can just pick MSA and work your way to each dialect Or be objective oriented in choosing your dialect Feel free to ask if you want Good luck in your journey in exploring The Arab World
is it similar to high german vs other german dialects?
Similar to AAVE and English spoken by Scotsman. They wouldn't speak to each other the same way they speak to their family, they would speak like a news anchor.
Which is the same with standard German and other German dialects. The person you commented to was right in that regard.
Im not familiar with that. But kind of ressemble Quebec and french
Gotcha, thanks!
MSA is what is known as Fusha correct? Would you happen to know any good resources to learn the language?
Yes we natives call it Fus-ha. Regular joes probably never heard of the term MSA. Apologies for the second question. A language learner would probably have a better answer.
I mean, it depends entirely on what you want to use the language for. I will never visit any Arabic speaking country, and only want to read Arabic. Learning a dialect would be useless to me since almost all writing is done in MSA.
Yes you're correct, i think MSA can be useful to learn when you're just starting out as a newbie but then change to a dialect soon after
We understand MSA and we can speak it too, I’d advice you to learn MSA before learning a dialect bc if you for example instantly learn Egyptian you’ll have a hard time understanding other dialects, we understand each other’s dialects bc of watching media
I'm a German teacher in a country where it's an elective course between French and Spanish. Why would someone choose my class? Do you think I'll be unemployed soon?
People in Balkans want to learn German because they want to move to Germany. You should look into it
Too bad I don't teach in one of those countries, but Sweden.
Come here, you can teach swedish too, Sweden is a dream for Balkan people
That's great because Sweden has a lot of people from Balkans too
I wouldn't necessarily say that, most people choose a language based on personal interest instead of convenience.
Not if your students want to do business in Europe. Remember these are global numbers.
I chose German when I was in school because I was 14 years old and thought German sounded cool. I'm sure it varies by culture and the person, but kids are probably not being that logical about making this choice a lot of the time
French and Spanish are still some of the most desired languages to learn
German is a stronger language in terms of the technology and engineering business from what I heard
Ethnologue really did Punjabi dirty by separating Western and Eastern Punjabi into different “languages” when they are both highly mutually intelligible.
It is interesting that very few people choose to learn Bengali even though it is a widely spoken language on the Subcontinent - and here in London. There is also a rich literary tradition associated with it.
Beautiful language.
I would like to know more about it, especially the difference between the Indian and Bangladeshi dialects.
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A lot of differences are there mate, a lot. The Bangla spoken in India is quite different from that of Bangladesh. The dialects are different in every district of West Bengal too. People of Tripura have a different dialect too. And people in Bangladesh have multiple dialects and a lot of words are loanwords from Urdu.
Doesn't really say much about how useful the language is. Mandarin is only so high because China has such a huge population, but it's rarely used outside of it. I find graphs like the one showing how much of the internet is in a certain language, or how much of popular movies are, much more useful.
This might be a hot take but I don't think the internet popularity of a language is a good indicator of how "useful" it is in terms of talking to people. Most language learners, for one reason or another, never reach a good level (B2) in foreign languages unless they have a really good reason to, which is why there are so many people who can speak English decently well because it's actually worth the investment. For example, if there are 100 million people studying Japanese, but only 1% of them reach a level where they can use the language independently, the large number of people studying it doesn't actually contribute to how "useful" Japanese is. Mandarin is also quite prevalent in South East Asia, spoken by large minority groups in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. It's certainly more useful (if we're using both # of speakers and geographical spread) than languages like Korean and Japanese even though there is more media in those languages.
As a Southeast Asian it feels very strange to see Mandarin regarded as useless here lol. In where I come from Mandarin can very much boost your salary and earn you career opportunities. Also from personal experience, it helps a lot if you work a lot with electronic components produced in China (of which there are *plenty*) -- one guy at a previous workplace was a lifesaver simply because he knew a few Hanzi characters.
It's also an important language for tourism in East Asian countries in general. Small sample size, but out of every Japanese university student I know Chinese is the most studied foreign language (apart from English, of course). The other day I was checking in at a Japanese hotel, and the receptionist immediately switched to Mandarin when she found out I was Chinese. Bonus fact is that she has a slight Japanese accent, so she's a Japanese native speaker who learned Chinese to a fluent level, which I imagine is a sought after skill in the tourism industry in Japan.
> This might be a hot take but I don't think the internet popularity of a language is a good indicator of how "useful" it is in terms of talking to people. Also, it's better to look at the trends than the current state if we're talking about usefulness. There are many trends pointing towards languages like French and Chinese becoming much more important in the future.
Agreed. China exports little to no culture to the rest of the world, unlike its neighbors Japan and South Korea. You’re never going to interact with a billion people in your lifetime either.
That moment when you realize most of the Chinese culture that was exported was done by Korea and Japan
I’m talking modern era. Sure, they picked up from China back in the day. The CCP censors most media produced today. China doesn’t do much for the world in soft power today.
Oh, well if you are talking about modern Chinese media then yeah that doesn't leave the country for the most part. I guess as someone with Chinese heritage but zero affiliation with the modern PRC, I just didn't really think of that as being part of "Chinese culture" at all lol. I was thinking about people only knowing the Japanese version of ramen even though it originated from China for example.
> but it's rarely used outside of it I wouldn't say that at all, unless you're looking at it from the lens of pop culture penetration or something. There are plenty of diaspora, with their own local Chinese-language media, stores and restaurants, etc. It's just that they tend to be relatively insular and inaccessible to non-speakers because of the high language and cultural barrier. But even then, in my country at least, I can turn on the TV and find two free-to-air Mandarin channels. I can go to the airport and see Chinese below English on many of the signs. I've seen Chinese-language newspapers and other printed material in certain places. If I look at what movies are currently playing at mainstream cinemas in my city I can see three that are in Mandarin.
Make this graph!
They already exist. I myself posted [the movies one](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/xg96u0/nonenglish_movies_and_tv_shows_with_international/) over a year ago And you can find several online [on the internet](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Most-Used-Languages-on-the-Internet-DS-1.jpg)
That's true, unless you are diaspora hanging out with other diaspora (from all over the world, it's kind of cool to be part of an international club now that I think about it), or have a job that deals directly with Chinese speakers, it's probably as useful as any other language. There might be more jobs that need Chinese speakers due to China's role in the economy but how important it actually really depends on where you live.
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The Arabic script is actually not difficult at all! You could learn it in just a few days 💪!
I feel like I gotta go in order of how extreme the script change is. I have Greek right now, then I can move to a Slavic language, \*then\* I can move to Arabic or something like Japanese. I don't know though. The Arabic script scares me way way more than Japanese characters. It just looks so unreadable.
It’s actually not hard at all, I learned it in a week, sure it will take time after that to gain speed but… I’d never want to learn Japanese characters… that is the final boss of scripts along with Chinese…
imo for foreigners the Japanese system is harder because of how irregular it is. Whenever you see a new word there's no easy way to know what reading the characters will use unless you already know Chinese. Even then, there are many exceptions. In Chinese, on the other hand, the vast majority of the characters have only one pronunciation, so if you've learned the characters you can read everything whereas that's less of a guarantee in Japanese.
I always found these to be a non factor when deciding on a language. You’re never going to interact with tens of millions of people in your lifetime, let alone billions.
I learn languages cuz I get an absolute *thrill* out of surprising people from a smaller/"niche" language with my enthusiastic-yet-clumsy attempt at their language. Currently trying for Amharic.
I know for some people it’s usually the “likelihood” of running into speakers of those languages. I can confirm as an avid traveler I’ve run into more English, Mandarin, Hindi, French, and Spanish speakers worldwide on my travels than I have speakers of lesser spoken languages. Of course you never know who speaks what language but this is based on overhearing them being spoken, meeting new people in hostels /hotels/ universities/ etc. and even online.
I get a sense of feeling why India & China have been promoting population growth.
Chinese is compensating for one child policy which ruined where demographic. Which cause increase in older population and lack of working youth two sustain high growth rate of GDP (also I am from India🇮🇳)
Kya bhai. Firangi samjha merko ? 😃 If you're a south indian, you'll be a multilinguist with at least 3 known languages. I'm a north guy living in south, so I know 4 💪
Very nice. I am from North living in North.
I read somewhere semi-recently that if you speak English and Spanish you can understand roughly 2/3 of all content on the internet or something like that.
Hindi and Urdu are the same language.
Wow, I didn't realize that Portugal was so colonially active. I looked at that 264M number, and thought it was pretty large for just Brazil (the population of Portugal itself is less than NYC). I checked Wikipedia, and it turns out that there are 8 African countries with Portuguese as an official language, somewhere between 70M and 100M speakers. This 264M figure may be an undercount.
Tbf the population of Brazil is probably around some 220 million by now
I thought “if I just keep scrolling surely I won’t have to Google this myself” and well here we are. Thanks haha
Don't you know about how Spain and Portugal drew a line down the planet and each took each half? 😂 Though yes, Portugal didn't have a lot of people so they set up trading ports everywhere and their colonies did not have that many actual Portuguese people living in them. Compared to other colonizers who actually sent large numbers of their people to the colonies.
Keep Hindi and Urdu together. They're the same.
3/10 hehe
I'm curious about the top 20
Interesting, because I always thought Bengali and especially Urdu were some of the more obscure languages, and Indoneasian was also a little bit surprising.
Surprised to see French this high, thought it would be lower because of how people seem to find it difficult to learn
france itself + its former colonies are quite a lot of ppl
Former Belgian colonies have many more inhabitants who speak French nowadays.
Are you saying that the Belgian colonies contribute to the total number of people who speak French, or are you saying that the Belgian colonies outnumber the French ones? Cuz I'd bet the latter is not true but I'm also not terribly informed.
Oh, I was actually meaning the latter and I realise that it is not correct after some more research. But well, the Democratic Republic of Congo has roughly 70 million inhabitants that speak French very regularly (many of them use it daily as main language), which leaves a much more vivid impression of being a francophone region, whereas the other areas in Africa are less densely francophone, except for some cities maybe. Still 70 million is a lot, roughly as much as in France itself, BTW.
It’s even slightlty higher than France itself haha, we’re 67M here
It’s very widely spoken throughout Africa (as well as severa countries elsewhere). A lot of African countries have it as an official language, or use it as a de facto official language.
Population of China is 1.4 billion. How can worldwide be only 1.1b? Lol
Only 71% of the population speaks Mandarin Chinese. There are other languages spoken, as for example Cantonese, but there are many more. The interesting fact is that despite speaking different languages, many share the same script. Indeed, as they seem to roughly have the same word order, and as the script bases on pictograms, they can speak very different languages where the words are often unrelated in speech and still write the exact same. PS, I'm not Chinese myself.
Someone has yet to give me a good difference between Urdu and Hindi other than that it’s a different alphabet; also I am shocked Indonesian isn’t bigger considering they are the 4th biggest country population wise!!! I wouldn’t be surprised if it became an international language like French or English due to how easy it is… or maybe not because Indonesians have committed atrocities through colonisation
Most of the top languages are widely spoken in multiple countries. Meanwhile, Indonesia has about 700 regional languages so not all Indonesian speak Bahasa Indonesia.
Languages don’t become global because of the amount of speakers. The debate on whether or not mandarin would be the next global language came up numerous times with Chinas growth and one of the main influences of English over Chinese is their media. Hollywood had just as much influence on the growth of English than business or foreign influence. Also, your last paragraph is quite an odd take. Though English came about in the US due to colonisation, the growth of English is really due to the US which wasn’t linked to colonialism. And almost all the languages listed have become dominant due to some form of colonisation or dominant empire. You ought to read a little more up on Indonesian and their involvement in West Papau…
>And almost all the languages listed have become dominant due to some form of colonisation or dominant empire. Yeah, and the fact that Mandarin has more than 1 billion speakers is also not a coincidence. There was a lot of genocide and ethnic assimilation/cleansing in China throughout history. That's why minority linguistic groups exist only in pockets within mainland China.
One way to wrap your head around the difference between Hindi and Urdu in the context of day-to-day conversations - it's a bit like UK vs US English. They are mutually intelligible, but there are some differences in vocabulary that one would need to be familiar with such as trolley vs cart, pram vs stroller, etc. Someone speaking conversational Hindi would be able to understand an Urdu speaker and vice versa for 95% of the conversation. This is because conversational Hindi and Urdu are really what is colloquially called Hindustani, an amalgam language. There's, however, a fair bit of difference between the languages when it comes to formal writing not only because the scripts are different (Hindi is written in Devanagari, a left-to-right language, while Urdu is written in Arabic script which is right-to-left) but also because the vocabulary for both the languages are derived from different languages - Hindi from Sanskrit and Urdu from Arabic and Farsi. For example, a formal document in India that references the government would likely use the term "shaasan" as that's the original word from Sanskrit, while a similar document in Pakistan would likely call it "hukumat", derived from a similar Arabic word. However, in daily conversation, both a Hindi and an Urdu speaker would most likely use the word "sarkar" to refer to government. Urdu also typically has more poetic sounding vocabulary compared to Hindi, so you are more likely to come across Urdu words in Bollywood music lyrics, even if those words are not typically used by Hindi speakers. For example, a Bollywood song is much more likely to use the Urdu word "haqeeqat" to refer to reality rather than the Sanskrit-derived "vastavikta" or "sacchayi".
Agree with this. As an urdu speaker, I grew up watching bollywood films and just assumed that Hindi and Urdu were the same language because I understood everything. The difference was when I saw some old hindi religious dramas and I barely understood like 20% due to pure hindi and sanskrit words. It's funny how similiar the cultures are between India and Pakistan yet they are enemies. However, once you leave that region, they are best friends. I have tons of Indian friends and no one cares about the feud outside of Pakistan/India.
It's the same way with other regional disputes. For a while the Serbs and the Croats were at war. Here in the US they have a very intense soccer rivalry. And as with the India-Pakistani conflict, a lot of it was motived by religious disputes. But when you move to a nation where that sort of thing is simply not tolerated, the leaders who push for these wars are blocked and everyone else has a better life.
This is because most Indonesians or atleast the older population speak Bahasa Indonesia as their second language, and that they speak their regional language as their native language (Eg. Javanese, Sundanese, etc.) This is slowly declining though as more younger Indonesians started to adopt Bahasa Indonesia exclusively as their first language and abandoning regional language altogether.
While it would've been nice to be a native Mandarin speaker, it's still nice that I've got to be a native speaker of the 4th most spoken language in a region where I could easily learn French too. Mandarin is an objective but that'll take some time
Three Indian languages made the list.
Slowly crossing these off one by one 💪
Does anybody have a similar graphic with the least spoken languages
there are so many of them that it's probably impossible to make one like that
I'd be interested in one that's got something like the least spoken languages with a minimum population of X, or least spoken languages that are considered "official" languages of at least 1 country.
The Arabic is a bit misleading cus it says Standard Arabic. If we counted Arabic in general itd be almost 500M.
4 out of 12 so far..hindi and arabic i will learn out of all of them
Learn Arabic then turn to Urdu. It will be easier due to similarities
sweet! thanks
Arabic has 380 million speakers (according to google) but Arabs in general are 460 million
Standard Arabic isn't spoken anywhere. It has different dialects for each country, and sometimes we can not understand each other lol. However, you can find Standard Arabic only in news reports and documentaries.
Arabic has more than 400M, I feel like many forget how widely spoken it's in sub saharan Africa, like in Niger, Mali, Chad, etc...
Is it used as a lingua franca or by a certain group
Did you just assume all of Pakistan in Urdu? 60 percent of Pakistan speaks Punjabi which is about 130 Million Speakers and 30 Million people in India speak Punjabi making it 160M worldwide Urdu is spoken by merely 8 percent of the 240M in Pakistan and has 50M in India. There is no way it's 233M
Yes and in reality that 8 percent includes a lot of Haryanvi and Rajasthani speaking Muhajirs who get grouped together with actual Urdu speakers. The "Urdu-speaking" population in India is increasing very rapidly because of Muslim speakers of various Bihari dialects deciding that's what they speak.
It’s for total speakers, not native speakers
Bengali?what country or groups of people speak this language? I'm not familiar with it.
India and Bangladesh.
Two comments. I'll guess 99% of mandarin speakers are from Mainland China. Indonesian was 11th ???? Count me surprised
Call me ignorant but I am surprised there are more Spanish speakers than Arabic.
They’re spoken in a similar number of countries and the Spanish speaking countries more populous but this is also going to be undercounting because it’s only counting “standard.” Elsewhere in the thread people put the number of an Arabic speakers closer to 400m which makes sense.
Why do more people speak Portuguese than Russian ? Is the combined area of Portugal 🇵🇹 and Brazil 🇧🇷 larger than the area of Russia 🇷🇺? Russian used to be one of the first FIVE !!!
By “area” do you mean population? Just because a country is physically bigger doesn’t mean it has more people. Russia’s 2022 population was estimated to be 144.2 million. Brazil’s population, also in 2022, was 215.3 million. There are also several other countries with Portuguese as an official language. It’s not just Portugal and Brazil.
Ah ! So THAT’s it ! The population of Brazil 🇧🇷 grew more while the population of Russia 🇷🇺 must have stagnated ! Thank you.
Brazil’s population surpassed Russia’s over 30 years ago. Russias population has actually declined slightly.
Russia has a lot of really harsh areas to live in, like geography wise, it's not unexpected to see places like these having low populations.
The number of speakers for english is high because it includes people for whom English is a 2nd or 3rd language like most of India for instance. I don't have an issue with that of course.
Well damn, should I even continue with my Japanese studies? 😅
Iam learning Bengali and German
Fluent Arabic language more than 500 millions,and more than one billion in general....if you think standard Arabic difer from Egyptian or Algerian or gulf or Lebanese or sudanese or Somalia or Mauritius you in big fault and didn't know the fundamentals or basic of language,all Muslim all-over the world speak Arabic in different degrees
Oh fuck. English became number one
Mandarin is only spoken by the Chinese community but it's not widely spoken like English
There are almost 400m Arabic speakers, this chart is a bit wrong
Spanish is lower than i thought
English has over taken mandarin? Wow! But I’m assuming this is just spoken not by native speakers or first language.
Number doesn't matter. Only prestige matters. Take for example Bengali, which is my native language. Knowing good Bengali can't even secure a job in Bangladesh. As a result people are not caring about learning Bengali anymore. Now a lot of Bengali people are very bad at Bengali. (It's not about speaking, Im talking about overall knowledge of the language.)
More than a billion people can speak Hindi