The language puzzle

Google is an amazing thing. You can learn a lot from the world wide web. There is a bit of a problem though and even stating the problem I have to also add that there is an up side to the problem.
I know, a confusing statement.
As I see it there are, due to historically logical reasons, a handful of main languages that are spoken world wide. According to statistics of the ones in the know, Population wise the most commonly spoken language is Mandarin...(Vindication at last!!) with about 1052 million Tibetans and 1151 million Sinitic people speaking it. Actually the list is quite surprising when it comes to what we have been taught in school. I went through my whole lot of school days believing that most of the world spoke french. While not exactly a lie, this is a tad misleading. Admittedly french will get you by in quite a lot of countries around the world. As will Spanish and English of course.

Napoleon went to Africa so that covers one continent. Where the French didn't get to the Germans did. (But we won't go there right now) The Spanish conquered the new world and the British Empire took care of the rest. (And don't say that we no longer have am Empire. Where Marmite has failed to spread, you have cricket and although they won't admit it Baseball is just rounders with more fans)
But this way of thinking, where language is concerned is changing people!!! Here's the list:

Mandarin comes first (not surprising, there are a lot of Chinese)

2.) Spanish (most of the Americas contribute to this) 500million speakers

3.)English, 508million as of 2009

4.) Hindi/Urdu, 487 million

5.) Arabic, 246million

6.) Bengali, 211 million

7.) Portuguese, 240 million (something like 30 million of which as a second language)

8.) Russian, 177 million

9.) Japanese, 132 million

Other surprising statistics are as follows:

Germany comes in at number 10 with 101 million speakers world wide - there was 2 years wasted at school.

French at number 16 with 128 million so the short man syndrome of Napoleon didn't spread as far as he thought. Unfortunately the school system continues to inflict us with it, meaning there are up to 200 million of us slaughtering our Oui! Oui's! as I type this.

Polish comes in at number 28 with 44million worldwide which given the current border agency issues is quite surprising.

Greek is spoken by 12 million as a native language and 10 million as a second language putting it in at number 64.

Take that Michael Caine!!! There are 9.6 million people speaking Zulu, minimum!!! putting it at the 70th most widely spoken language.

Catalan is at number 95 with only 6.5 million people actually speaking it, even if it more widely known by many people.

Strangely enough the Language of the Tartar's is at 107th place with 5.7 million mustached heathens on horse back making Yule Brenner proud.

And it beats Norway as there are only 5 million native speakers putting Norwegian in at 118th place.

Shame on all you blue faced Scotts!! A man gets hung, drawn and quartered and stuck on a pike for your FREEDOM!!! and there are only 1.5 million of you bothering to learns your own language. You're down at 217th place.

The Welsh aren't even really rated as there are only around 1 million of them speaking their native Welsh tongue. But they're a pretty small country so I'm forgiving them....this time.

Less than 10,000 people in Alaska or the planet speak Alaskan.

And thanks to all those meddling Pilgrims and later cowboys and the french only roughly 200 people speak original Comanche. Flipping Americans, even the British empire hasn't ever NEARLY whipped out an entire language.

Now for the other little tidbit. And this is almost the end I promise. There are three small bits of information for you all to mull over.
Esperanto, the made up international language is spoken world wide by over 2 million people as of 2009 (sorry for the old data everyone) but it could be more. So we know that some things can be maintained if we only try.

To back this up the Natives of the Pitcairn Islands- for those of you that don't read, these are the islands that the mutineers from the Infamous 'Bounty' settled on with their kidnapped wives. They speak a sort of Creole mishmash derived from Norfolk (English one not American) where they mostly came from. It's called NORFUK and is spoken by all 616 people still populating the Island/s. That's 100% of the population!!!

And the sad news only 1 person (again as of 2009) still speaks the Language YAGHAN on Chile and came in on the bottom of the list. Now if he never taught anyone and has since died....well that is now an extinct language.

It can happen people!! Preserve your language people! Speak it properly and then use your brains and learn a new one.

And so ends my rant for the day.