Of widely spoken languages, Bengali, linguistic diversity, and hope for a more integrated world

A few weeks back a friend and I were exchanging notes on our recent travels. He asked "Do you know which are the most widely spoken languages in the world?".  He added "You would be surprised to find out the answer. Even i could not believe it when an American ex-colleague told me about this".

I pondered.   Languages spoken by majority citizens in most populous countries of the world should figure in the list – Mandarin and Hindi should be in. National languages of countries which have ruled different parts of the world for significant period of time should also figure in the list – Spanish, English, and Portuguese (to a lesser extent) should also be in. Arabic should be in too.

I wikied for the information.  This is what i found (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers):

• ·         Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, English, and Portuguese do figure in the list.

• ·         But so do Bengali and Punjabi! :)

I was surprised!

Bengali is the 6^th most spoken language in the world but has only around 181 million native speakers (people from West Bengal and Bangladesh).

I thought  "Is the world so diverse linguistically?"

I found that the number of languages in the world spoken by more than 100 million people is around 10. People who speak these languages number to around 2.9 billion – that is around 42 % of world's population (6.93 billion).The composition of the remaining 58% is where the linguistic diversity shows.

It seems there are around 6000 living languages in the world. This data by itself may not reveal too much as we would have to look for languages in active use by large enough groups.

It seems around 48% of these 6000 languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people – that's close to 3000 languages which are spoken by a significant number of people.

That's a mind boggling number when you consider there are only 195 countries in the world!

If we were to use diversity in language as a representation of diversity in world views, the present world citizens are doing a good job of bringing the world closer together.

But I am left with a question at the end – "What aids this 'across cultures' integration?". I am not sure of the answer. A first thought which comes to mind is something i had read in an article written by  P. Chidambaram (the current Home Minister of India). He had said that economic development is the common tide which lifts all boats and brings them closer together.

 

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Sourav