Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers

This article is subject to repeated attempts at promoting particular languages. If you have a reliable source which disagrees with the numbers here, you can add it to "Other estimates". However, for the list as a whole we need a single source that covers all of these languages simultaneously; anything else would be inconsistent and lead to gaming the system. Unfortunately, there are not many good options to choose from.

This article was nominated for deletion on 5 January 2010. The result of the discussion was keep.

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Numbers Mashreqi Arabic/Eastern Arabic native speakers?

I have ben thinking about lately, and I am not speaking here about the number of speakers of Modern Standard Arabic, that indeed, the eastern Arabic languages/dialects are mutually intelligible. I see people from Egypt conversing with people from Syria without having any problem. Also, the Peninsular Arabic dialects ara intelligible with the languages in the eastern branch of the spoken Arabic language. Therefore, I disagree with this map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/btwej0/part_two_languages_that_are_secretly_different/ I do believe that Sudanese and Egyptian Arabic should be added to the Mashreqi Arabic language, since their speakers do not need to switch into Modern Standard Arabic, nor they need to necessarily have been previously exposed to the variety they are listening to. That is, a Sudanese speaker does not have any major problem understanding an iraqi speaker and viceversa. I am of course open to read about other people´s opinions, since the Arabic Dilectology is a topic that interests me a lot.

So, the number of native speakers of mashreqi Arabic would be 282 million, or 300 according to this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashriqi_Arabic, making it the fifth most spoken native language in the world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.241.34.248 (talk) 09:47, 26 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pashto

Pashto is a language which is more than 100 million people’s speaking 2A02:1811:D30:9C00:F86D:AF67:5A43:3EBE (talk) 19:24, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A Group of Languages as the Most Natively Spoken Language?

Mandarin Chinese in this article refers to a group of languages spoken in Northwestern China. But this list should have individual languages, not a group of languages as the most natively spoken language. If Mandarin can be here, why can't Chinese be the most spoken native language? Because we would argue Chinese is not a single language. But of the same logic, Mandarin Chinese is not a single language as well, so why is that? RockyLi0601 (talk) 10:06, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 19 October 2024

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37.203.155.18 (talk) 10:59, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Aradhana is the oldest language in the world

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. NotAGenious (talk) 14:28, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Punjabi

Why are West Punjabi and East Punjabi written separately? It's a united, mutually intelligible language with two scripts, so it should be just Punjabi. HHislegend (talk) 04:14, 27 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We follow the source. a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 09:11, 27 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Swahili????

Swahili has more than 100m native speakers; are you people on Cocaine??? Even Native speakers of English is underestimated severely 185.237.102.83 (talk) 20:13, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]