Linguistic demography is the
statistical study
A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data at hand sufficiently support a particular hypothesis.
Hypothesis testing allows us to make probabilistic statements about population parameters.
...
of
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
s among all populations. Estimating the number of speakers of a given language is not straightforward, and various estimates may diverge considerably. This is first of all due to the question of defining "
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
" vs. "
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
". Identification of varieties as a single language or as distinct languages is often based on ethnic, cultural, or political considerations rather than
mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...
. The second difficulty is
multilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...
, complicating the definition of "native language". Finally, in many countries, insufficient
census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses in ...
data add to the difficulties.
Demolinguistics is a branch of
Sociology of language
Sociology of language is the study of the relations between language and society. It is closely related to the field of sociolinguistics, which focuses on the effect of society on language. One of its longest and most prolific practitioners was J ...
observing linguistic trends as affected by population distribution and redistribution and by the status of societies.
Most spoken languages
The following table compares the estimates of Comrie (1998) and Weber (1997)
[Bernard Comrie, Encarta Encyclopedia (1998); George Weber “Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages” in Language Today (Vol. 2, Dec 1997)] (number of native speakers in millions). Also given are the estimates of
SIL Ethnologue
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensi ...
(2005).
Comparing estimates that do not date to the same year is problematic due to the 1.14% per year growth of
world population
In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded 8 billion in November 2022. It took over 200,000 years of human prehistory and history for th ...
(with significant regional differences).
This table shows that for the world's largest languages, it is impossible to give an estimate of the number of native speakers with a certainty better than maybe 10% or 20% or so.
See also
*
List of languages by number of native speakers
This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers.
However, all such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialec ...
*
List of languages by total number of speakers
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers.
It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. Some languages, such as Chinese and Arabic, cover several mutually unintelligible varieties and are sometime ...
*
Abstand and ausbau languages
In sociolinguistics, an abstand language is a language variety or cluster of varieties with significant linguistic distance from all others, while an ausbau language is a standard variety, possibly with related dependent varieties. Heinz Kloss i ...
*
Autonomous language
Autonomy and heteronomy are complementary attributes of a language variety describing its functional relationship with related varieties.
The concepts were introduced by William A. Stewart in 1968, and provide a way of distinguishing a ''language ...
*
Language geography
Language geography is the branch of human geography that studies the geographic distribution of language(s) or its constituent elements. Linguistic geography can also refer to studies of how people talk about the landscape. For example, toponymy ...
*
Languages in censuses
Case studies:
**
Language demographics of Quebec
**
Language Spoken at Home (U.S. Census)
Notes
Literature
*
Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Ca ...
, ''Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time'', University of Chicago Press (1992), .
*David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (eds.), ''Census and Indentiry : The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses'', {{ISBN, 978-0-521-80823-1.
*Jacques Pohl, ''Demolinguistics and Language Problems'' (1972).
*
H. Kloss, G. McConnell (eds.), ''Linguistic Composition of the Nations of the World'' vol. 2, ''North America'', Quebec (1974–1984).
External links
CIA - The World Factbook
- first language vs total speakers, degree of influence, etc. Plus graphs and charts.
EthnologueUnicode.org Top Languages by GDP Graphs
Linguistics
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...