Talk:List of languages by number of native speakers

This article is subject to repeated attempts at promoting particular languages. If you have a reliable source which disagrees with the numbers here, you can add it to "Other estimates". However, for the list as a whole we need a single source that covers all of these languages simultaneously; anything else would be inconsistent and lead to gaming the system. Unfortunately, there are not many good options to choose from.

This article was nominated for deletion on 5 January 2010. The result of the discussion was keep.

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A Group of Languages as the Most Natively Spoken Language?

Mandarin Chinese in this article refers to a group of languages spoken in Northwestern China. But this list should have individual languages, not a group of languages as the most natively spoken language. If Mandarin can be here, why can't Chinese be the most spoken native language? Because we would argue Chinese is not a single language. But of the same logic, Mandarin Chinese is not a single language as well, so why is that? RockyLi0601 (talk) 10:06, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 19 October 2024

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37.203.155.18 (talk) 10:59, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Aradhana is the oldest language in the world

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. NotAGenious (talk) 14:28, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Punjabi

Why are West Punjabi and East Punjabi written separately? It's a united, mutually intelligible language with two scripts, so it should be just Punjabi. HHislegend (talk) 04:14, 27 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We follow the source. a455bcd9 (Antoine) (talk) 09:11, 27 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Swahili????

Swahili has more than 100m native speakers; are you people on Cocaine??? Even Native speakers of English is underestimated severely 185.237.102.83 (talk) 20:13, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 3 January 2025

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In the list of languages based on percent of native speakers. Arabic is meant to be 4 not 3. The number was doubletyped. Change 3 to 4 105.116.9.77 (talk) 10:40, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done. The source has the approximate figure 5.1% for both English and Arabic, which an editor has interpreted as a tie. It is very unlikely that the actual situation is a tie. The ordinals are not in the source, which places English before Arabic, so if we are going to supply ordinals while respecting the source, Arabic should indeed be 4. Kanguole 10:52, 3 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]