Interesting quiz. I was very surprised Cantonese didn't make the list. I was also surprised at some others that didn't make the cut, such as Persian, Tagalog, and Tamil.
Political or cultural significance of a language doesn't always correspond to the number of speakers. Only a bit over half of Irani population are Persian native speakers, a quarter of Filipinos are Tagalog and Cantonese is only the prestige dialect of its group.
Cultural links don't always mean the language is widely spoken. As Djilas mentioned before, Persian and Tagalog aren't that widely spoken. Same goes for other continents too. Here in Ireland, you'd struggle to find anyone incapable of understanding English bar immigrants.
There are explanations for the others so my guess is Tamil is well known for having a long history and being a very conservative Dravidian language, so it is often used as a representative of Dravidian languages since it is not as big of a language family as Indo-European or Sino-Tibetan but one of the most spoken still. Because of this it's also talked about more by both non-native speakers and native speakers. It's also official in 2 countries so people learning official languages might think of it.
15 million? I think there are fewer 15 elderly people remaining in a remote village near Qiqihar who can still speak Manchurian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language
Manchu was almost a dead language by the end of the Qing dynasty in the early 1900's (which began using manchu, and became extremely sinicized over the next several centuries to the point that almost no court officials could speak it), to say nothing of a hundred years after it's end today. Like the below commenters said, native Manchu speakers are almost gone today and fluent speakers be it first or second/third/etc. language are rare. Almost all ethnic Manchu speak Mandarin Chinese as a first language.
Shanghai dialect belongs to Wu, but in addition to Shanghai, Wu is also spoken in southern Jiangsu Province, almost the entire Zhejiang Province, northeastern Jiangxi Province, southeastern Anhui Province, and the northernmost part of Fujian Province. The total population of these places must be over 80 million
I might be misremembering it, but I remember seeing a joke about how you hear Shanghainese in the countryside around Shanghai, Mandarin in the suburbs, and English in the city. I can't attest how accurate it is but I thought it was funny.
shouldn't russian be on here? There's a lot of Central Asian countries where it's common as a second language, aside from Russia. at least give me a source somewhere with accurate information.
According to the source there are 160 million speakers. 95 million live in Europe. Leaving 65 million in Asia (assuming there are none in the rest of the World). How am I being stubborn? That's less than 76 million for 11/12th place.
It was surprising that Cantonese was not on the list. I also wonder about English because India has a large number of English-speaking citizens and Sri Lanka, once Ceylon, had speakers of English.
I was also surprised about Cantonese, especially given the population of the Guangdong province, which is about the same as Japan. So not sure if this is a mistake.
About English in South Asia or other parts of Asia, the explanation is simple. Most speakers are not "native" speakers.
There are more than 100 million people in Guangdong Province, but not all of them speak Cantonese. There are also many people in Guangdong Province who speak Hakka, Teochew, Luichew Min, Shaozhou Tuhua. These languages don't belong to cantonese. Among them, Teochew and Luichew Min belong to Min, and are close relatives of Hokkien.
For anyone wondering, Wikipedia lists 70 million for Persian, 68 million for Urdu, 75 million for Tamil, and 83 million for Marathi (at the 2011 census; it seems like that should be added, especially as it is also listed on the Top World Languages quiz).
spoken by 90 mil.
Don't know about the source but 90M seems way over head to me.
About English in South Asia or other parts of Asia, the explanation is simple. Most speakers are not "native" speakers.
Mandarin Chinese - 941
Hindi - 345
Bengali - 237
Japanese - 123
Yue Chinese - 86
Vietnamese - 85
Turkish - 84
Wu Chinese - 83
Marathi - 83
Telugu - 83
Western Punjabi - 82
Korean - 81