In which the author indulges his penchant for facts that others may find either extremely fascinating or boring beyond words.

This post is about speaking in tongues. Wait, it’s not what you think.

I found a list recently of the languages of the world ranked by number of native speakers. Other lists exist with other numbers, plus there is a lot of disputing about what a language is and what a dialect is, the numbers are all just estimates anyway, and I’m not at all sure that the figures are current, but let’s just keep it simple and go with this list. Here’s what I learned:

Nine languages have more than 100,000,000 native speakers each. The largest by far is Mandarin (845,000,000), followed by Spanish (329,000,000), English (328,000,000), Hindi/Urdu (242,000,000), Arabic (221,000,000), Bengali (181,000,000), Portuguese (178,000,000), Russian (144,000,000), and Japanese (122,000,000). If you’re keeping count, that accounts for 2,590,000,000 persons, or about one-third of Earth’s population.

If your favorite hasn’t shown up yet, keep reading.

Thirteen languages have between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 native speakers each. They are German (90,300,000), Javanese (84,600,000), Punjabi (78,300,000), Wu (77,200,000), Telugu (69,800,000), Marathi (68,100,000), Vietnamese (68,600,000), French (67,800,000), Korean (66,300,000), Tamil (65,700,000), Italian (61,700,000), Turkish (61,000,000), and Cantonese/Yue (55,500,000).

The world doesn’t seem quite so Eurocentric now, does it? Still looking for your favorite? Let us forge ahead.

Languages with between 25,000,000 and 50,000,000 native speakers each include Tagalog (including Filipino) (48,900,000), Gujarati (46,500,000), Min (46,200,000), Maithili (45,000,000), Polish (40,000,000), Ukrainian (39,400,000), Malay (39,100,000), Bhojpuri (38,500,000), Xiang (36,000,000), Malayalam (35,700,000), Kannada (35,400,000), Sunda (34,000,000), Burmese (32,300,000), Oriya (31,700,000), Persian (31,300,000), Berber (30,000,000), and Hakka (30,000,000).

I have never heard of some of these languages.

Languages with between 10,000,000 and 25,000,000 native speakers each are Hausa (24,200,000), Romanian (23,400,000), Bahasa Indonesian (23,200,000), Dutch (21,700,000), Azerbaijani (21,600,000), Gan (21,000,000), Thai (20,300,000), and on down the line through Yoruba, Sindhi, Uzbek, Igbo, Saraiki, Amharic, Nepali, Serbo-Croatian, Kurdish, Cebuano, Assamese, Malagasy, Hungarian, Zhuang, Madurese, Sinhalese, Greek, Fula/Fulfulde, Czech, Shona, and Oromo.

I’m exhausted, and we’ve named only 67 of the world’s languages.

Here’s a startling fact: Sixty-seven is approximately 1% of the number of languages spoken in the world (I found three figures, 6700, 6900, and a range of “from 6000 to 7000” languages). Two hundred to 250 languages have over a million speakers each. Ninety per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 100,000 speakers each.

“So what?” you ask. (I can hear you asking it.)

The United Nations was organized in 1945. Fifty-one countries were represented at the first general session in 1946. Today, 192 countries are members of the United Nations. Six “official” languages are used in the U.N.'s intergovernmental meetings and documents: Arabic, Chinese, English French, Russian, and Spanish. (Originally there were five. Arabic was added in 1973.)

One of the rules is that the Secretary-General of the U.N. cannot originate from one of the five “permanent” Security Council member states (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America). Since 1945, there have been eight Secretaries-General of the U.N.: Trygve Lie of Norway, Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden, U Thant of Burma (now Myanmar), Kurt Waldheim of Austria, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Kofi Annan of Ghana, and the current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea.

Not a Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, or Japanese speaker in the bunch.

So here’s what: A lot of people must feel under-represented at best and ignored at worst. In other words, a lot of people are far worse off than you, in ways I have not enumerated and that many of us cannot begin to understand.

Now for the speaking in tongues part:

Kwitcherbellyachin.