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Old 01-23-2007, 04:49 AM   #11
KaVir
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Name: Richard
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I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to here - surely not speakers worldwide?



"Current estimates suggest that 1.5 billion people speak English"

(Obviously there are far fewer native English speakers - an estimated 560 million or so - but I don't think that's a particularly useful statistic in this case).

I can't find any links to the estimated number of chinese speakers, although Wikipedia suggests that it is "more than 1.3 billion".


However I think it's more worthwhile to look at how many speakers of each language there are who use the internet. This link covers language zones rather than actual languages, but may still be of interest:



It shows around 287.5 million English speakers and 102.6 million Chinese speakers - however the statistics are from 2003, and looking further I found this:



Which shows projected figures for 2005 as 300 million English speakers and 220 million Chinese speakers. If the numbers continue to grow at the same rate, then that would place the two at around the same figure in 2007, but I can't find any statistics to back that up.

However once again it's discussing language zones rather than actual languages (i.e., the locations where the ~560 million native English speakers live, rather than the locations where the estimated 1.5 billion overall English speakers live).

I also found this for 2007, although it only gives you the choice of really vague or really specific locations:

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