Talk:Number of languages by country

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"Number of speakers"[edit]

I think that "number of speakers" column is incredibly misleading as well as redundant. Obviously, every living person who doesn't have some kind of speech disability, speaks a language. So the descriptor "number of speakers" is identical in this instance to a country's "population". But that's apparently not the case, unless this list hasn't been updated recently. For instance, Australia's "number of speakers" is cited as ~23 million, yet there's 25 million people in Australia. So what exactly is the "number of speakers" column supposed to clarify or elucidate? Number of speakers of WHICH language? And why would the number be any different from the population, unless there's 2 million mute people in Australia? I think that column should be removed, as it doesn't actually convey any meaningful information at all. The languages being spoken by these "speakers" are not specified, so presumably it's referring to all languages spoken in that country, which, again, should be an identical figure to the population, because EVERYONE aside from the minority of mute and otherwise vocally disabled people [who certainly do not constitute 2 million people in Australia, or ANY country for that matter] speaks at least one language. I'll remove it myself in a day or two if there are no responses. 1.157.95.133 (talk) 08:22, 23 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You're referring to the total number of speakers column, right? It may or may not be useful to readers on its own, but in my opinion, in combination with the number of languages it gives an idea of how the language diversity is distributed with respect to the size of the population (e.g. that the few languages of Japan are spoken by a huge population, or that the tremendous number of languages of Papua New Guinea are confined to a small population). I think this column makes more sense when seen together with the following two columns, which give the average number of speakers per language for the given country. – Uanfala (talk) 18:29, 25 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Can somebody flag this as needing better sources? It cites a single website, with no explanations of sourcing. JSory (talk) 18:18, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it has to cite a single source for the ordering: we can't pick and choose different figures from different sources as they're guaranteed to have used different methodologies for arriving at that figure. Still, more columns can be added for the numbers based on other sources, if there are any. Maybe country totals can be extracted from Glottolog? – Uanfala (talk) 11:54, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is true for all articles. This should at the very least be flagged like the other articles that cite this same source, or even better merged with "List of Languages by total number of speakers" and "List of languages by total number of native speakers", and into a more unified (and less "listicle") article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JSory (talk • contribs) 08:22, 7 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Immigrant languages[edit]

What is meant by immigrant languages? There are 167 spoken languages in Finland according to it's national registry, of which 3 are native and 164 foreign. Yet this says only 25. I also find it hard to believe that Sweden would have fewer immigrant languages than Finland, Norway and Sweden. And only 3 in Indonesia? Does it only count the major ones or all of them? I think the section on immigrant languages is flawed, as is the entire article as it's based on just one source. Finlandestonia (talk) 18:38, 4 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Maths[edit]

The numbers are partially inconsistent. For example for South Korea, there are 5 languages and 48,586,000 total speakers. So the mean should be 48,586,000 / 5 = 9,717,200 speakers. But the number given (16,195,333) is obviously 1/3 of the total. And the median is also mathematically impossible for 5 languages and very implausible for 3 languages. Another example where the mean is obviously wrong is Germany.

To me it looks like some of the columns have been updated at some point without recomputing/updating the others. Ligneus (talk) 22:56, 28 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]