Description

This article is from the Japanese FAQ, by TANAKA Tomoyuki tanaka@cs.indiana.edu and Olaf Meeuwissen olaf@IMSL.shinshu-u.ac.jp with numerous contributions by others.

01 Japanese is one of the world's top-10 languages.

in terms of number of speakers, 20 years ago Japanese
was number 7 in the world. it has slipped somewhat in
the raking, but it's still in the top 10.

|--------------------------------------------------------------------
| from http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html
| 
| Rank  Language                   Country         Population
|  1     CHINESE, MANDARIN [CHN]    China           885,000,000
|  2     ENGLISH [ENG]              United Kingdom  322,000,000
|  3     SPANISH [SPN]              Spain           266,000,000
|  4     BENGALI [BNG]              Bangladesh      189,000,000
|  5     HINDI [HND]                India           182,000,000
|  6     PORTUGUESE [POR]           Portugal        170,000,000
|  7     RUSSIAN [RUS]              Russia          170,000,000
|  8     JAPANESE [JPN]             Japan           125,000,000
|  9     GERMAN, STANDARD [GER]     Germany          98,000,000
| 10     CHINESE, WU [WUU]          China            77,175,000
  
|--------------------------------------------------------------------
| from "The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1996"
| 
| Speakers (in millions)
|                         Native   Total
|    1. Mandarin            844     975
|    2. Hindi               340     437
|    3. Spanish             339     392
|    4. English             326     478
|    5. Bengali             193     200
|    6. Arabic              190     225
|    7. Russian             169     284
|    8. Portuguese          172     184
|    9. Japanese            125     126
|   10. German               98     123
|   11. French               73     125
|   12. Malay-Indonesian     52     159
|
| 		(from  Keith Finch < finch@unforgettable.com> )

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