The Cunning Linguist

From time to time I poke around various language pages on Wikipedia, and this is one of my favourites: the list of languages by number of native speakers. Considering language study is a means to understand more people than you did before, this page has to be pretty interesting to any serious linguist.

And here is a remarkable statistic and damn good reason to continue my study of Mandarin; I will be able to speak to six hundred million more people using Mandarin than I currently can using English - that's almost nine hundred million people who's native language is Mandarin. Yes, there are three times as many native Mandarin speakers as there are native English speakers.

In the light of that, it seems almost negligent not to learn Mandarin!

Have decided to try and update this blog with little observations more often, instead of writing them on a post-it and thinking "I'll cook up a decent sized post around that someday" (and then mislaying them). Hopefully this will result in a few more ideas making it onto the site!