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Q: More Chinese speakers than English speakers in the world

 

I was looking through my Chinese books trying to improve Chinese reading and writting skills. Midway through the book, there was a page entitled " interesting facts" and it said there are more Chinese speakers than English speakers in the world, can this be true ? I cant remember the exact statistic but it showed there were double the chinese speakers than people who spoke English. Obviously there are more chinese speakers than English speakers in China but out of China, surely there are more english speakers than chinese speakers in the world so how can these statistics be true ?

 

P.S before any theories are expressed, this book was published in the U.K. and written by british born billigual women

7 years 29 weeks ago in  General  - China

 
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From what I know this is one of these things where there are hundreds of different ways to measure it. All of which give a different result.

 

I know that Chinese (not sure if this is putonghua or all the dialects combined) has the highest number of native speakers, followed by Spanish and then English is 3rd. But English is the most widely spoken, meaning the most amount of countries have English as an official language.  Also I suspect that if you include non native speakers English is the language with the most amount of speakers, but I haven't got any evidence for that.

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7 years 29 weeks ago
 
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Posts: 205

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From what I know this is one of these things where there are hundreds of different ways to measure it. All of which give a different result.

 

I know that Chinese (not sure if this is putonghua or all the dialects combined) has the highest number of native speakers, followed by Spanish and then English is 3rd. But English is the most widely spoken, meaning the most amount of countries have English as an official language.  Also I suspect that if you include non native speakers English is the language with the most amount of speakers, but I haven't got any evidence for that.

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7 years 29 weeks ago
 
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Simple question, if you want to do business in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia (in different countries), which language is more useful?

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7 years 29 weeks ago
 
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Chinese has the most numbers of native speakers followed by Spanish then English. But I think English is number one when you count native and non native.

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7 years 28 weeks ago
 
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 This is what google tells:  Most Widely Spoken Languages in the WorldLanguage 1Approx. number of speakers1. Chinese 21,197,000,0002. Spanish414,000,0003. English335,000,0004. Hindi260,000,000

 

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Considering the worlds population is roughly 7.5 billion, for 21 billion people to speak Chinese is mighty impressive!

7 years 28 weeks ago
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7 years 28 weeks ago
 
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English is the international language of business.  That is reason enough for everyone to learn English. 

Shining_brow:

While true, I think it would be much better for the world if everyone learned Esperanto as a second language (and whatever third language after that). granted, English has a hell of a lot of vocab (specific and technical), the grammar can seriously suck, and the spelling confusing.

7 years 28 weeks ago
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7 years 28 weeks ago
 
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Chinese is cultural if you dig it deep.

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7 years 27 weeks ago
 
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