List of languages by number of native speakers
This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers.
However, all such(a) rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise the coherent sort of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. For example, a Linguistic communication is often defined as a vintage of varieties that are mutually intelligible, but independent national specifics languages may be considered to be separate languages even though they are largely mutually intelligible, as in the issue of Danish together with Norwegian. Conversely, many normally accepted languages, including ] While Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors describe its mutually unintelligible varieties as separate languages. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a divided up culture together with common literary language. It is also common to describe various Chinese dialect groups, such as Mandarin, Wu and Yue, as languages, even though regarded and target separately. of these groups contains many mutually unintelligible varieties.
There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which remodel over time because of population change and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is non current, or the census may non record languages spoken, or record them ambiguously. Sometimes speaker populations are exaggerated for political reasons, or speakers of minority languages may be under-reported in favour of a national language.