My point was just that this site: http://www.glreach.com/globstats/
only shows statistics for "native speakers" which I had interpreted as
meaning "mother tongue speakers". I'm not completely clear, from their
description of their methods, whether they count a high proficiency
second-language speaker (like an FSI/ACTFL Reading level 5) as "native
speaker" or not. It does look like they allow some overlap, so maybe I
was mistaken and they do allow for this.
Your origional assumption is wrong. For example, if you look at the Chinese number carefully by clicking the "21" subscript link next to the Chinese 68.4
. It tell you
(21) Chinese. There are 56.6 M people online in mainland China, according to a report released by the The Economic Times (April, 2002). Hong Kong represents another 4.3 M (Nielsen/NetRatings, Aug., 2001). One must also add 11.6 M in Taiwan (Nielsen/NetRatings, March, 2001) and 2.26 M people in Singapore online (Source: Nielsen NetRatings: Feb., 2002). ITU estimates 5.7 M Malaysians online (Dec., 2001), where Mandarin Chinese is spoken by one-third of the population. There are another 1.9 M Americans who access the Internet in Chinese. This gives a total of 69 M Chinese-speaking people online.
I believe the 2.26M people in Singapore online, 5.7 M Malaysians online, and 1.9 M Americans whoc access the Internet in Chinese are all bi-lingual or tri-lingual users.
