A couple more notes from the last update. For Dutch, we ignored Indonesia in the Wikipedia article because the data was from 1985 and almost all the Dutch speakers would have died of old age by now.
Mandarin is tricky because many Asian countries have large and influential Chinese diasporas, but they usually speak either the native language or a non-Mandarin dialect.
I expected more countries from Africa to be there for French and possibly other languages too, but I guess they are technically not native speakers even though they often learn it very intensively and from a very young age at school
I'd be willing to bet Malaysia is ahead of Singapore. In my experience most Malaysian Chinese speak at least passable Mandarin, and there are far more of them than the entire population of Singapore (some of which are not native Mandarin speakers).
That got me looking into Italian immigration into Brazil in the late 19th, early 20th century. After Brazilian slavery was abolished, there was, shall we say, a labor shortage, so the nation of Brazil paid for travel for Europeans to come and effectively settle the southern part of the country, much like America did with the Homestead act. Poor Italians were the ones who answered the call and formed a bunch of isolated Italian communities in Southern Brazil. Some cities even still have Italian names.
Good quiz: Without looking at the data, the difference in numbers between the top and fifth would vary greatly by language, which makes it a challenging and fun quiz.
Jetpunk considers Taiwan a sovereign state despite it being only recognised by 11 UN member states and the Holy See. Palestine on the other hand, which not only has non-member observer state status at the UN (which Taiwan doesn't have) but is considered a sovereign state by 157 UN Member states including 4 permanent security council members (UK, France, Russia and China) isn't recognised as a state by Jetpunk. Okay
It’s based on sovereignty. Whatever your beliefs on the right of Palestine to be a state, the government currently does not have control over its territory, while Taiwan does. That’s Jetpunk’s rationale anyway
In that case, Transnistria, Somaliland, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Northern Cyprus should all be recognized by JetPunk as the governments of these entities control their territory just like Taiwan does.
I tried so hard for the third Portuguese one, 95% of my time was spent on it. When I gave up I looked to see what it was; despair set in, alas, it was Portugal.
English, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_(Language)_speakers
Spanish, Arabic: Jetpunk Quiz
Mandarin: Ethnologue
Mandarin is tricky because many Asian countries have large and influential Chinese diasporas, but they usually speak either the native language or a non-Mandarin dialect.