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Comment by kilovoltaire | Hacker News Reader

> Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English outnumber natives by a ratio of three to one.

I was vaguely aware of this, but hadn't really thought about the numbers.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

In the event it's not obvious, English is 3rd in terms of native speakers, but you'll need to calculate all the others to compare with all non-native speakers of English.

Of the languages on this list, here are the subset where non-native (L2) speakers outnumber native (L1) speakers by a factor of two or more:

- English (378m L1, 744m L2)

- French (77m L1, 208m L2)

- Malay (77m L1, 204m L2)

- Swahili (16m L1, 82m L2)

- Thai (21m L1, 40m L2)

Technically Thai isn't quite 2x, but the error bars on these numbers are generally big.

Some languages have an opposite distribution, where nearly all of the language's speakers are L1 speakers. Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, and Wu/Shanghainese are in this category, as well as perhaps Spanish (only ~14% of speakers are L2, which surprised me). Many others fall somewhere in between.

This would make an interesting data visualization.

Thailand's population is around 68 million. So they are saying that only about a third of Thais are L1 speakers of Thai? That seems quite strange.

About 20 million people in northeastern Thailand speak Isan, a dialect of Lao. There's also a long tail of languages spoken in minority communities. Thai is widely spoken in Bangkok but the rural areas are much more of a patchwork in terms of languages used. As I said though, these numbers have large error bars so it's hard to be very certain of what the actual distribution looks like today.

Well, there's India. Which sort of blows up the curve, what with their billion-plus population.

Only a minority speak English.

A 12% minority of one billion[1] is still greater than the combined populations of the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

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