It is very possible that some data is lacking. Besides that the majority of people in French speaking Africa actually speak a less popular local language and use French as a second language to communicate with other tribes and ethnicities.
I wonder how Pakistan ends up among the countries with the highest number of "native" speakers of English. If for any reason it refers to the number of people using English as the means of communication irrespective of their nativity (which I doubt given the title and description of the quiz), even then India should come before Pakistan here. Please double check. Thanks.
You are right to be skeptic. I don't remember my sources, but I feel like native speakers and total speakers got mixed around for some of these. For instance Nepal has very few native Hindi speakers, but a handful of millions speak it as a second language and that's why it's on the quiz.
As for English, I believe South Africa should come after Australia in terms of native speakers.
I really need to clean up some of my older quizzes (although this one isn't too old, I'll get around to updating it). Cheers!
Caribbean Hindustani seems to have been dropped from usage in Guyana quicker than in Suirname. I cannot find any figures, but reportedly it's mainly the older generation in Guyana that still speaks any Hindi. Otherwise I have 150 thousand speakers for Suriname and 15 thousand for Trinidad.
Does this only count citizens and not expats or resident workers? I would have thought that a country like the UAE, KSA, or Qatar would have placed in the top 5 for Hindi or Malay, and maybe even Mandarin, if it counted the latter. Though I know there are more immigrants in those places who speak Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Malayalam, so, maybe not.
I am not sure the reason behind, but Hindi is not a terribly common language amongst Indian expatriates in general. In the UAE I got a number of 144,000 Hindi-speakers for example. If I used or combined the figures with Urdu then more Gulf countries would surely be here. Since Hindi is used as a lingua franca for North Indians I would imagine that you would hear a lot of Hindi from L2 speakers, however.
You're right, Arabic should probably be on here since I doubt foreigners make up such a large percentage of the population (and surely there are foreigners living in Saudi Arabia from other countries in the Arab World). Perhaps I got it confused due to the different Arabic dialects spoken in Saudi Arabia? Other way I will look into it thank you :)
Yes, it is now added. I keep stalling these updates when it probably doesn't matter that the stats are reset. No points on the line here, haha!
I got a number of almost 27 million Arabic speakers in Saudi Arabia, and I just bumped Iraq to 67% Arabic-speaking. I believe that both of these numbers may be higher. I've had a little trouble finding good figures for Arabic, some sources split Arabic into Mesopotamian Arabic, Gulf Arabic, etc., and so that may have thrown it off.
- For Angola, the country has been moving towards Portuguese as a native language, and younger generations tend to speak Portuguese rather than Indigenous African languages. A big part of this, I read, was from the immense internal displacement during the Civil War. I always assumed Portuguese had a similar role in Angola to, say French in the DRC, so this surprised me!
- Most Indian emmigrants speak other languages than Hindi (although North Indians will typically use Hindi as a L2 lingua franca). Perhaps even more surprisingly, Hindi has less than 70 thousand speakers in the UK! Urdu has more than 250,000 speakers and is functionally the same language in its informal variety bar for slightly different vocabulary.
- Probably a mistake on my part, they can happen :)
According to wikipedia, over 40% of India speak Hindi natively and I intuitively expected more immigrants from India in the UK than from Russia in Germany so the fact that there are over 15 times as many Russian speakers in Germany than there are Hindi speakers in the UK is really against my expectations!
It is very interesting! If I'm not mistaken the regions of India which produce the most emmigrants are typically the more wealthy regions (i.e. Punjab). States which speak the most Hindi (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, etc.) are often the less wealthy states and people who live here less often have the finances to move overseas.
We have a lot of Punjabi people here in Canada, although all the Canadian Punjabis I've met can speak Hindi as a second language too :)
Interesting, it may depend on the source you use! Even counting people's native language can be a difficult endeavour as languages mix/people use multiple languages at home.
My figures are ever so slightly out of date, so according to Pew Research the population speaking Spanish as a native languages should be a little over 38 million people, out of a population of 47 million (2020)
Yes, as of 2020 that is true. However the population statistics are from a couple years back and the Republic of Ireland only recently crossed 5 million people. Also, since this quiz only considers native English speakers, a majority of the immigrants to Ireland + the Gaeltacht are discluded from the quiz. We can assume that similar population growth has happened in the other countries under English too, so it's unlikely the rankings have changed recently.
Sorry for rambling, I wanted to make my quiz reasoning clear!
You are right to be skeptic. I don't remember my sources, but I feel like native speakers and total speakers got mixed around for some of these. For instance Nepal has very few native Hindi speakers, but a handful of millions speak it as a second language and that's why it's on the quiz.
As for English, I believe South Africa should come after Australia in terms of native speakers.
I really need to clean up some of my older quizzes (although this one isn't too old, I'll get around to updating it). Cheers!
I was also surprised that less than half of Iraqis speak Arabic. I'm guessing the rest of the population speaks Kurdish and/or Persian?
Anyways, great quiz!
I got a number of almost 27 million Arabic speakers in Saudi Arabia, and I just bumped Iraq to 67% Arabic-speaking. I believe that both of these numbers may be higher. I've had a little trouble finding good figures for Arabic, some sources split Arabic into Mesopotamian Arabic, Gulf Arabic, etc., and so that may have thrown it off.
- so many people in Angola speak Portuguese natively
- there aren't even 150k Hindi speakers in the UK
- there are fewer than 15.7m Arabic speakers in Saudi Arabia
- For Angola, the country has been moving towards Portuguese as a native language, and younger generations tend to speak Portuguese rather than Indigenous African languages. A big part of this, I read, was from the immense internal displacement during the Civil War. I always assumed Portuguese had a similar role in Angola to, say French in the DRC, so this surprised me!
- Most Indian emmigrants speak other languages than Hindi (although North Indians will typically use Hindi as a L2 lingua franca). Perhaps even more surprisingly, Hindi has less than 70 thousand speakers in the UK! Urdu has more than 250,000 speakers and is functionally the same language in its informal variety bar for slightly different vocabulary.
- Probably a mistake on my part, they can happen :)
You just learn new things everyday on JetPunk. :)
We have a lot of Punjabi people here in Canada, although all the Canadian Punjabis I've met can speak Hindi as a second language too :)
For me, it was surprising the number of Spanish native speakers in Spain. The number I usually see is well above 40m.
My figures are ever so slightly out of date, so according to Pew Research the population speaking Spanish as a native languages should be a little over 38 million people, out of a population of 47 million (2020)
Sorry for rambling, I wanted to make my quiz reasoning clear!
Reality - All the f... people (48 m) speaking spanish in Spain, wherever the region