List of languages by or situation. number of speakers
This is a list of languages by or situation. number of speakers.
It is unmanageable to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. Some languages, such as Chinese together with Arabic, fall out several mutually unintelligible varieties as well as are sometimes considered single languages together with sometimes Linguistic communication families. Conversely, colloquial registers of Hindi and Urdu are near completely mutually intelligible, and are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani, instead of two separate languages. such(a) rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent types of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum.
There is no single criterion for how much knowledge is sufficient to be counted as a second-language speaker. For example, English has about 370 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to construct as numerous as 2 billion speakers.
There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which clear adjustments to over time because of population modify and language shift. In some areas, there is no reliable census data, the data is not 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 favor of a national language.