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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

If you count by L1 speakers, English is only third. If you count by number of people with working proficiency of the language, English has somewhere between 1 and 2 billion speakers, which is probably more than the number of Mandarin speakers. Second language stats are really sketchy, but English is unique for being a language which is among the top native languages and having many more non-native speakers than native speakers.

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As you can see, I respect you more: I spend some of my time to provide links for you as proofs. But nevermind, it's offtopic anyway. And it's not so important for me to argue about :)

L1 speakers are relatively easy to gauge, since national censuses would provide sufficiently accurate statistics. Accounting for L2 speakers is very difficult, since there's often little-to-no census-level statistics on the matter, and the definition of proficiency for estimates is difficult to ascertain. Order-of-magnitude estimates are roughly the only level you can do.

On that matter, there are some languages which are clearly much more common (over twice as common) as second languages than native languages. English, French, Malay, and Swahili are obvious candidates for this: English is a common secondary language, well, everywhere; French is common second language in Africa; Swahili in East Africa, and Malay in Malaysia/Indonesia.

And still erkl did it and you were too lazy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

thx

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