Interesting quiz. I was very surprised Cantonese didn't make the list. I was also surprised at some others that didn't make the cut, such as Persian, Tagalog, and Tamil.
Political or cultural significance of a language doesn't always correspond to the number of speakers. Only a bit over half of Irani population are Persian native speakers, a quarter of Filipinos are Tagalog and Cantonese is only the prestige dialect of its group.
Cultural links don't always mean the language is widely spoken. As Djilas mentioned before, Persian and Tagalog aren't that widely spoken. Same goes for other continents too. Here in Ireland, you'd struggle to find anyone incapable of understanding English bar immigrants.
15 million? I think there are fewer 15 elderly people remaining in a remote village near Qiqihar who can still speak Manchurian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language
Manchu was almost a dead language by the end of the Qing dynasty in the early 1900's (which began using manchu, and became extremely sinicized over the next several centuries to the point that almost no court officials could speak it), to say nothing of a hundred years after it's end today. Like the below commenters said, native Manchu speakers are almost gone today and fluent speakers be it first or second/third/etc. language are rare. Almost all ethnic Manchu speak Mandarin Chinese as a first language.
shouldn't russian be on here? There's a lot of Central Asian countries where it's common as a second language, aside from Russia. at least give me a source somewhere with accurate information.
According to the source there are 160 million speakers. 95 million live in Europe. Leaving 65 million in Asia (assuming there are none in the rest of the World). How am I being stubborn? That's less than 76 million for 11/12th place.
It was surprising that Cantonese was not on the list. I also wonder about English because India has a large number of English-speaking citizens and Sri Lanka, once Ceylon, had speakers of English.
spoken by 90 mil.
Don't know about the source but 90M seems way over head to me.