In Reply to: translation posted by hells_bells on Wednesday, 11. January 2012 at 15:21 Bali Time:
Yes most of this came from google!!
But have very strong feelings about this, over the past some 15 years we have travelled and communicated in on e for or another with various people around the world and as you can see by my grammer and spelling English is not my first language and now at 48 I have begun to little understand/ conprhend and communicate in BI, I find in general most of us Ausrtalians will not even try to learn the Basics's of good morning , afternoon ,may I have, thankyou ,Please and the list could go on all day,yes and I'm having a bad day so feel like making a comment even though I'll be blasted out for it. Below is some studies you may wish to look at and concider, but all I'm saying give it a go (that's what where known for ) isn't it, who cares if the pronounciation is incorrect (5 kg Seluk ot 5 Kg of Culuk ( pronounced CHeluk)) have a laugh for those whom know!
After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige), Weber compiled the following list of the world's ten most influential languages:
(number of points given in parentheses)
the word for someone that can spaek more than 1 or 2 languages, or even littleunderstand it is
:PolyGlots,
This question is a very interesting one that has a rather complicated answer. Estimates of how many people speak a language are quite general and can vary considerably. For example, English estimates vary from 275 to 450 million, Spanish from 150 to over 300 million, Hindi from 150 to 350 million, and Russian from 150 to 180 million.
To further complicate matters, the definition of 'speaker' can be vague. Some surveys of languages give information on native speakers only. Others count both native speakers and secondary speakers (those who use the language regularly or primarily even though it is not their native language).
Lastly, it is important to consider not only the population (number) of language speakers, but also the geographic distribution of these languages. Some languages have relatively large populations of native speakers but are used almost exclusively in a few countries. On the other hand, other languages have relatively small populations of native speakers but are used in many different countries as an official or national language.
The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) Ethnologue Survey (1999) lists the following as the top languages by population:
(number of native speakers in parentheses)
Chinese* (937,132,000)
Spanish (332,000,000)
English (322,000,000)
Bengali (189,000,000)
Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
Arabic* (174,950,000)
Portuguese (170,000,000)
Russian (170,000,000)
Japanese (125,000,000)
German (98,000,000)
French* (79,572,000)
* The totals given for Chinese, Arabic, and French include more than one SIL variety.