Tuthmes wrote:Well Latin lingo's = Portugese, Spanish, Italian, French. Lingo's share a common bond and some are related to eachother. English, Dutch, German for example fall under the Indo - Europeen family.
All those languages you listed are from the Indo - European family and they all use the Latin script (character set). Russian is an example of a language from the Indo - European family also except it uses Cyrilic as it's character set. There's not really a seperation between Spanish and English in terms of character set and language family.
Tuthmes wrote:So it's a bit fage, its just the way you wanne count it . If you count portugese and spanish as a whole (i know, not the same, but very close) and count how large the latin community is in the US and in the rest of the America's, you could say it is the most common used language atm.
Even if you included those it still wouldn't beat Mandarin. Also, if you do that you also have to count all the people in other countries who can speak English which would include a noticeable chunk of people from China and India which again would dwarf Spanish. As mentioned previously the recent stats all seem to show Spanish in decline.
Found this rather interesting link:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
The right hand column is the most interesting, it's a 2006 figure of the estimated number of people that speak the language regardless of boundaries. The body text of this link is pretty interesting too:
http://anthro.palomar.edu/language/language_1.htm
To sum up from all the links I've come across today it seems Spanish dropped from 2nd place as the most spoken language somewhere around 97, since then English has taken a much more prominent 2nd place and Hindi/Urdu has pushed it's way up and pushed Spanish into 4th during that time to the point where it's fighting English for 2nd place in the stats for primary language speakers. In terms of the amount of people who speak languages as both their first and second language, Chinese still comes first however English also seems to be a clear second and Hindi/Urdu in 3rd. English as a language seems to excel when we account for all speakers, not just speakers of it as a primary language because of reasons cited early - that it really is an important international language, whereas Spanish/Hindi/Urdu/Chinese have a less important place in international business and politics. This doesn't effect Chinese's 1st place because of the sheer number of speakers - when you account for only primary languages Chinese has about 1.1 billion and English somewhere around 340 - 500 million, when you take into account secondary, tertiary etc. languages Chinese stays at 1.1 billion yet English jumps to anything from 500 million to 1.1 billion depending on which stats you look at. Hindi/Urdu/Spanish follow the same trend as Chinese in that they just don't seem to budge much from the amount of people that speak them as a primary language and people that speak them secondary. It seems therefore that Spanish/Hindi/Urdu speakers probably speak those languages because it is their country's primary language and they're probably more inclined to speak English as a secondary whereas English speaking country's have little inclination to learn Spanish/Hindi/Urdu in return due to English's dominant position in the international arena.
how about honour and shame?
. If you count portugese and spanish as a whole (i know, not the same, but very close) and count how large the latin community is in the US and in the rest of the America's, you could say it is the most common used language atm.
