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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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To: LindyBill who wrote (101529)2/21/2005 8:11:54 PM
From: aladin  Read Replies (2) of 793756
 
Bill,

Saying 'Chinese' and mixing up all the dialects may make them wrong in one sense, but they are probably still right. Assume that the largest dialect is Cantonese (from a Taiwanese friend) and that the others add up to the Cantonese - this leaves 1.1 Billion speaking Standard Mandarin.

Now against that we have 300 million US, and 100 Million from UK, Canada, Australia and NZ - so about 400 million native speakers who claim English as their mother tongue.

Now the British empire also went through India and you will find Indians do not list English as their native tongue for Nationalistic reasons, but most speak it :-) Add 130 Million Nigerians, 100 Million elsewhere in Africa and 60 million Philipino's and the numbers now exceed Standard Mandarin.

Now English as a second/third language hits a few billion and Mandarin as a second/third language is quite a bit smaller.

John
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