Quoting Dylan Thurston ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > I'm not sure where some of the data for the supported fraction of the > world population comes from; it doesn't seem to come from the sources > mentioned. E.g., for English, you counted 1 billion speakers, but > photius.com gives only 322 million speakers. photius.com says the > source is the ethnologue, available online at > http://www.ethnologue.com . For English, Ethnologue gives 341 million > first language speakers and 508 million second language speakers; both > well short of 1 billion.
Hmmm, you're right. Indeed I pasted the wrong URL. Photius, Ethnologue and most others mentions the number of people for which a given language is the *first* language. The source I really used is Linguasphere's "World's major spoken languages": http://www.linguasphere.org/major.pdf.
