Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers

This article is subject to repeated attempts at promoting particular languages. If you have a reliable source which disagrees with the numbers here, you can add it to "Other estimates". However, for the list as a whole we need a single source that covers all of these languages simultaneously, so that there is a consistent standard for comparison. Unfortunately, there are not many good options to choose from.

This article was nominated for deletion on 5 January 2010. The result of the discussion was keep.

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Punjabi

Why are West Punjabi and East Punjabi written separately? It's a united, mutually intelligible language with two scripts, so it should be just Punjabi. HHislegend (talk) 04:14, 27 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We follow the source. a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 09:11, 27 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Swahili????

Swahili has more than 100m native speakers; are you people on Cocaine??? Even Native speakers of English is underestimated severely 185.237.102.83 (talk) 20:13, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm wondering about Swahili too. DrGoldin (talk) 12:12, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Swahili is mainly used as a lingua franca, even though it may have a lot of L2 speakers the case is not the same with native speakers. Dvorakuser1 (talk) 02:51, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 3 January 2025

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In the list of languages based on percent of native speakers. Arabic is meant to be 4 not 3. The number was doubletyped. Change 3 to 4 105.116.9.77 (talk) 10:40, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done. The source has the approximate figure 5.1% for both English and Arabic, which an editor has interpreted as a tie. It is very unlikely that the actual situation is a tie. The ordinals are not in the source, which places English before Arabic, so if we are going to supply ordinals while respecting the source, Arabic should indeed be 4. Kanguole 10:52, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 18 January 2025

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Add xofrd commas. 2603:8000:4003:7423:C439:A84:88E4:F6CE (talk) 05:07, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done Kovcszaln6 (talk) 16:29, 18 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

German as Standard German

German is treated as seperate languages eventhough spanish, english and especially korean are treated as the same language. German within Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland is not more distinct than different versions of spanish around the world. 2A0A:2782:3E9:4D00:1CCF:A2B2:7E70:A3F8 (talk) 14:34, 23 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

They did the same with Arabic. This is a lousy article. Other sources have Arabic as the 4th most spoken language. Being as there are 1.7 billion Muslims and many have memorized the entire Quran in Arabic, it is reasonable to assume that Arabic is more widely spoken than many other language.

Per German, as a student of German, I can affirm that I can also understand most of what a native Swiss or Austrian speaker says, so long as they don't go too far down the rabbit hole of local dialect. Andak001 (talk) 11:19, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Egyptian Arabic

Splitting Egyptian Arabic from Levantine Arabic drops these two mutually comprehensible dialects of the same language (viz. the Arabic part) from the 4th most spoken language in the world. There are many Arab speakers in the Gulf that speak another DIALECT as well as speakers in West Africa that speak another. If you had done the same with Spanish or Mandarin, neither of them would have been in the top 10. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andak001 (talk • contribs) 11:15, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]