![]() ![]() Top languages by population Ethnologue (2022, 25th edition) ![]() Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be under-reported in favor of a national language. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not current, or the census may not record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift. For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers. There is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. Such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. Conversely, colloquial registers of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible, and are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani, instead of two separate languages. For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered to be single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties and so they are sometimes considered language families instead. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. ![]() ![]() This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) ( March 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. Don’t hesitate to stop learning activities that don’t interest you and look for something more inspiring – this will help you keep your motivation up.This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia.
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