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Linguistic demography is the statistical study of
The following table compares the estimates of Comrie (1998) and Weber (1997)Bernard Comrie, Encarta Encyclopedia (1998); George Weber “Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages” in Language Today (Vol. 2, Dec 1997) (number of native speakers in millions). Also given are the estimates of SIL Ethnologue (2005).
Comparing estimates that do not date to the same year is problematic due to the 1.14% per year growth of
CIA - The World Factbook
- first language vs total speakers, degree of influence, etc. Plus graphs and charts.
EthnologueUnicode.org Top Languages by GDP Graphs
Linguistics Population statistics
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
s among all populations. Estimating the number of speakers of a given language is not straightforward, and various estimates may diverge considerably. This is first of all due to the question of defining "language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
" vs. "dialect
A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...
". Identification of varieties as a single language or as distinct languages is often based on ethnic, cultural, or political considerations rather than mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...
. The second difficulty is multilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...
, complicating the definition of "native language". Finally, in many countries, insufficient census
A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...
data add to the difficulties.
Demolinguistics is a branch of Sociology of language
Sociology of language is the study of the relations between language and society. It is closely related to the field of sociolinguistics, which focuses on the effect of society on language. One of its longest and most prolific practitioners was J ...
observing linguistic trends as affected by population distribution and redistribution and by the status of societies.
Most spoken languages
The following table compares the estimates of Comrie (1998) and Weber (1997)Bernard Comrie, Encarta Encyclopedia (1998); George Weber “Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages” in Language Today (Vol. 2, Dec 1997) (number of native speakers in millions). Also given are the estimates of SIL Ethnologue (2005).
Comparing estimates that do not date to the same year is problematic due to the 1.14% per year growth of world population
In demographics of the world, world demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently alive. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded eight billion in mid-November 2022. It took around 300,000 years of h ...
(with significant regional differences).
This table shows that for the world's largest languages, it is impossible to give an estimate of the number of native speakers with a certainty better than maybe 10% or 20% or so.
See also
*List of languages by number of native speakers
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers.
All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria f ...
*List of languages by total number of speakers
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers.
It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, while Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other a ...
*Abstand and ausbau languages
In sociolinguistics, an abstand language is a language variety or cluster of varieties with significant linguistic distance from all others, while an ausbau language is a standard variety, possibly with related dependent varieties. Heinz Klo ...
* Autonomous language
* Language geography
* Languages in censuses
Case studies:
* Language demographics of Quebec
* Language Spoken at Home
Notes
Literature
*Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Univer ...
, ''Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time'', University of Chicago Press (1992), .
*David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (eds.), ''Census and Indentiry : The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses'', {{ISBN, 978-0-521-80823-1.
*Jacques Pohl, ''Demolinguistics and Language Problems'' (1972).
* H. Kloss, G. McConnell (eds.), ''Linguistic Composition of the Nations of the World'' vol. 2, ''North America'', Quebec (1974–1984).
External links
CIA - The World Factbook
- first language vs total speakers, degree of influence, etc. Plus graphs and charts.
Linguistics Population statistics