Re: Supported fraction of world population
Quoting Dylan Thurston (dpt@lotus.bostoncoop.net):
> I'm not sure where some of the data for the supported fraction of the
> world population comes from; it doesn't seem to come from the sources
> mentioned. E.g., for English, you counted 1 billion speakers, but
> photius.com gives only 322 million speakers. photius.com says the
> source is the ethnologue, available online at
> http://www.ethnologue.com . For English, Ethnologue gives 341 million
> first language speakers and 508 million second language speakers; both
> well short of 1 billion.
Hmmm, you're right. Indeed I pasted the wrong URL. Photius, Ethnologue
and most others mentions the number of people for which a given
language is the *first* language.
The source I really used is Linguasphere's "World's major spoken
languages": http://www.linguasphere.org/major.pdf.
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