Are there more people who speak or understand English or Chinese?

January 20, 2011 9:20 AM

How many people on the planet speak or understand English?

And is this number greater than or less than the number of people on the planet who speak or understand Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese)?

I can only seem to find statistics on the native languages, where clearly Chinese is the most spoken language in the world, but I want information that includes second, third, fourth, and eighteenth languages as well. Thanks!

posted by Grither to science & nature (5 answers total)

The wikipedia article on English lists it as the first language of 309-400m, the second language of 199m-1.4b (wow, bit of a range there), and an overall of 500m-1.8billion. I suspect if you're looking for a broader definition of "understand," where it might be someone's 5th language that they're not fluent in, the larger numbers are what you're looking for.
posted by Tomorrowful at 9:24 AM on January 20, 2011

I would speculate English based on some simple deductive logic. Count all of the people in the world who speak English as a first language. Then count all of the people in the world who speak Chinese as their first language. If even the same percentage of people who speak Chinese understand English as the reverse, the Chinese win.
posted by proj at 9:47 AM on January 20, 2011

Native language statistics are more or less the only reliable statistics when it comes to languages. When it comes to non-native languages, it would probably be impossible to correctly assess fluency (which probably explains the wild range in Tomorrowful's post).

I know people for example, who can understand some level of English but would not be able to say, read a standard novel or write an essay.

So this is probably an unhelpful or whatever, but I'm just saying that this is a hard thing for anyone to find out without an astronomical bit of guesswork.
posted by Senza Volto at 9:52 AM on January 20, 2011

Note that Chinese is a family of languages and not a language as such and there is a certain amount of politics involved in defining it. Standard Mandarin supposedly has about 850million speakers worldwide.

Including Canontese seems unfair. It's a completely different language and most Mandarin speakers I know think it's completely impossible for anyone to understand. A more just comparison might be comparing the number of Chinese/Cantonese speakers with the number of speakers of Germanic (or Romance) languages.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 10:42 AM on January 20, 2011

I would assume there are more people who know and understand English more than who know and understand Chinese albeit the number of native Chinese speakers still out-win the number of Anglophones (Allophones who speak English by choice are excluded). English is a major international communication tool and is required to study as a second language in China, Japan, Korea, many European countries, etc. One very important aspect to consider is English fluency. Even though many school kids from Eastern Asia are required to learn English, not many can communicate well enough for native English speakers to understand.

Also, I disagree with the notion of discounting Cantonese as Chinese. Both written Cantonese and Mandarin use the Chinese characters whether simplified or traditional. They are essentially the same language with very limited amount of variations on syntax, grammar and certain commonly used words. Same apply with a Southern Chinese dialect Wu, no one who speaks Shanghai dialect, Wu or Szchuan dialect or you-name-it would say their dialect is not Chinese.

Besides, it is NOT impossible for Mandarin speaker or Cantonese speaker to understand one another. All they need is a bit of adjusting the accent and learning the essential dialect words and few sentence structures. Many adult speakers can learn the other dialect in roughly a month or so with immersion. A more just comparison would be between Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic.
posted by easilyconfused at 4:51 PM on January 22, 2011