Dutch Sixth

[Birchy]

Apparently, Dutch is the sixth most popular language spoken in Europe (20 million speakers). Does anybody know the order - by most popularly spoken - of the top five?

[Gef]

I think you will find that there are 20 million Dutch speakers world wide (see http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~vcook/WSUsersStats.
htm ) My guess for the top 5 European languages would be (in no particular order) English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

[mikewall01]

There are over 200 indigenous languages in Europe.
The mother-tongue spoken by most people in Europe is Russian, German, English, French and Italian; in that order.

[sft42]

Dodgy ground this one really it all depend on where you define Russia to be....Is it in Asia or Europe? and it also means if you take people's FIRST language only...if you take into account ALL...then English is way out in front.

[mikewall01]

sft42, there is no doubt that Russia is in Europe.
I was careful, in my answer, to put *mother-tongue*.
Exactly how many people speak other languages as a second or third language would be difficult to quantify

[sft42]

My apologies Birchy for going off topic and hijacking your question but this is for mikewall01

The Russian landmass west of the Ural Mountains, is commonly referred to as European Russia by most atlases, travel guides and geography experts. It is not a separate country, but rather called that because of its political, cultural and geographical blendings with Europe. For reference purposes it is shown above in a different shade of green, however, the entire country is still considered part of Asia.

This taken from http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/asia/r
u.htm

[mikewall01]

I apologise sft42. You are correct.
Should have checked my usual source of reliable information, the American CIA site, which you might find interesting.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/
rs.html#top

[mikewith]

Trying to clear up the Russia/ Europe/ Asia question: the brilliant Ethnologue lists 58 living languages in European Russia, with 153,655,000 Russian speakers. ( http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Ru
ssia+(Europe) ). The great majority of the population of Russia live in the European rather than Asian bits.

By contrast (note, not all info is bang up to date): German (perhaps 85million throughout Europe), French 60m), Italian (56m), English (55m in UK, plus others throughout Europe), Spanish (29m - only 72% of Spanish population speak Castillian as mother-tongue),

The same site lists 20m Dutch speakers but in Aruba, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Israel, Philippines, Surinam as well as Europe: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=D
UT