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Is number of speakers important?

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
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montmorency
Diglot
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United Kingdom
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Studies: Danish, Welsh

 
 Message 33 of 75
10 August 2013 at 11:38am | IP Logged 
beano wrote:
I would imagine there is a lot of satisfaction to be gained from learning
a smaller language. A Berliner is
hardly likely to cartwheel down Unter den Linden because you approached him in German.
But being able to
speak, say, Finnish must bring an enthusiastic response from the natives.


I found the mental image of this so tickling that I went a googling:

cartwheeling over the berlin wall


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beano
Diglot
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 Message 34 of 75
10 August 2013 at 12:38pm | IP Logged 
lichtrausch wrote:
1e4e6 wrote:
How is that not many speakers?

Have you taken a look at the number of speakers for some of the larger languages? Even
Portuguese, which is far from the largest, dwarfs Dutch by a factor of 10.

And your point about meeting a million people or whatever makes no sense, as was
explained in a previous post.


A lot depends on where you are based. The Netherlands are very close to the UK and only a cheap flight
away. Within an hour or two you can be surrounded by 15 million Dutch speakers. That's quite a lot of people.
Yes, Portuguese has many more natives and more media resources but there are enough books already
published in Dutch to keep you going for a lifetime. Where do you stop?
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casamata
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Studies: Portuguese

 
 Message 35 of 75
10 August 2013 at 2:27pm | IP Logged 
My take: The number of speakers of a language contributes to its global utility or usefulness. If two languages were spoken in exactly the same number of countries, had the same global distribution, same economic power/usefulness, but one had twice as many speakers, it would definitely tip the scales toward that language.

But obviously your personal desire to learn a language supersedes all other variables. But people that want to learn...Catalan and live in the USA, for example, are extremely rare. There is a reason that Spanish, French, and German are the most widely studied languages in the US.
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montmorency
Diglot
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 Message 36 of 75
10 August 2013 at 4:32pm | IP Logged 
beano wrote:


A lot depends on where you are based. The Netherlands are very close to the UK and only a cheap flight
away. Within an hour or two you can be surrounded by 15 million Dutch speakers. That's quite a lot of people.
Yes, Portuguese has many more natives and more media resources but there are enough books already
published in Dutch to keep you going for a lifetime. Where do you stop?



Belgium's even closer, and you can get there on the train. (Admittedly, it's not necessarily cheap to get there that way).
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lichtrausch
Triglot
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 Message 37 of 75
10 August 2013 at 5:11pm | IP Logged 
1e4e6 wrote:
I do not need to check the number of speakers for Portuguese [.....] In
the UK there are language books for Catalan, Polish, with levels for B1, B2, etc.
regardless of their having not as many speakers are Portuguese.

Most of this post is attacking straw men. The only thing I disagreed with was saying
Dutch has a large amount of speakers. It's the equivalent of a village boy standing in
awe in front of his village's five-storey town hall and exclaiming "What a tall
building!". Standing next to him, his friends who have lived in the city and seen 100
storey buildings can only shake their heads. But ultimately this is all just semantics so
if it makes you feel better, please keep thinking Dutch has a large amount of speakers.
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casamata
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Studies: Portuguese

 
 Message 38 of 75
10 August 2013 at 6:05pm | IP Logged 
lichtrausch wrote:
1e4e6 wrote:
I do not need to check the number of speakers for Portuguese [.....] In
the UK there are language books for Catalan, Polish, with levels for B1, B2, etc.
regardless of their having not as many speakers are Portuguese.

Most of this post is attacking straw men. The only thing I disagreed with was saying
Dutch has a large amount of speakers. It's the equivalent of a village boy standing in
awe in front of his village's five-storey town hall and exclaiming "What a tall
building!". Standing next to him, his friends who have lived in the city and seen 100
storey buildings can only shake their heads. But ultimately this is all just semantics so
if it makes you feel better, please keep thinking Dutch has a large amount of speakers.


It is all relative. Does Dutch have a lot more native (or non-native) speakers than...a village dialect in Africa or Asia with one million speakers. Why, yes. So relative to those languages, Dutch is spoken by a lot more people.

But relative to languages like English, Spanish, or Mandarin, barely anybody speaks Dutch.

It's all relative.
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1e4e6
Octoglot
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 Message 39 of 75
10 August 2013 at 8:54pm | IP Logged 
I already said that I knew that Dutch has less speakers than Portuguese, but I still do
not understand the "Eurocentric" comment. I am sure people outside of Europe consider
15-20 many, and even though Portuguese "is not that much", it probably would be in the
ten most spoken languages, which seems quite more than sufficient to be considered
"many". It is known that English has quite many speakers, but that does not mean that
just because a language requires at least one thousand million speakers to be
considered "many". Dutch has its own media, is a national language of some countries in
Europe, some countries in the West Indies, one in South America, some use in Indonesia,
etc. Whilst Danish and Swedish do not have this much influence, they have their own
television programmes, newspapers, music, etc., and have their own millions who speak
it. It seems enough to find an environment in which to interact and use the language,
regardless of the fact that it does not meet the influence of English, which is the
national language of countries on almost every continent since the 1600s.

Edited by 1e4e6 on 10 August 2013 at 8:54pm
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casamata
Senior Member
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Studies: Portuguese

 
 Message 40 of 75
10 August 2013 at 9:23pm | IP Logged 
1e4e6 wrote:
I already said that I knew that Dutch has less speakers than Portuguese, but I still do
not understand the "Eurocentric" comment. I am sure people outside of Europe consider
15-20 many, and even though Portuguese "is not that much", it probably would be in the
ten most spoken languages, which seems quite more than sufficient to be considered
"many". It is known that English has quite many speakers, but that does not mean that
just because a language requires at least one thousand million speakers to be
considered "many". Dutch has its own media, is a national language of some countries in
Europe, some countries in the West Indies, one in South America, some use in Indonesia,
etc. Whilst Danish and Swedish do not have this much influence, they have their own
television programmes, newspapers, music, etc., and have their own millions who speak
it. It seems enough to find an environment in which to interact and use the language,
regardless of the fact that it does not meet the influence of English, which is the
national language of countries on almost every continent since the 1600s.


I honestly agree with the "eurocentric comment." In the European bubble, 15-20 million may be a lot, but in our neck of the woods, a language that has 100+ million speakers is considered to be more of a big language. FYI, I'm sure you know this but Surinam in South America has about 560,000 people and not everybody there speaks Dutch as their first language. Compared to other languages like English, Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese, it is a tiny drop in the bucket. Also, Dutch has a tiny presence in Indonesia(few speak it and it isn't an official language anymore) and the global total of Dutch speakers is apparently 23 million or so.

That is a lot compared to somebody that speaks an endangered language with 1,000 speakers without many young speakers passing on the language, but relative to most of the traditional "heavyweights", very few. At the very least Dutch has official status in a few countries whereas some chinese dialects, for example, have millions of speakers and none or tenuous official status in their provinces.




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