Qwynegold wrote:
I suspect they've pulled that number from Ethnologue, where it says that all varieties of Minnan together are spoken by 37 million people in mainland China.
Wait a minute, doesn't Ethnologue say that
25.7 million people speak Minnan in China (I presume this means mainland China)? Or is that outdated?
The
Italian Wikipedia says Hokkien has 47.3 million speakers as of circa 2009, also citing Ethnologue, specifically
this page. But I think that page now says 49.8 million. The
Indonesian Wikipedia also says 49 million but followed by the words
(date missing) in English.
The Malay Wikipedia says "50 million (undated)." 
Quote:
Latin. The only thing I can find when googling is that apparently some pope or someone has said that he estimates that there are only 100 people who are as fluent in Latin as he is. But that seems like a very strict definition of fluency. I mean, just counting all the Latin teachers out there, there must be more than 100. Surely one must be able to say that at least they "know" Latin well.
I don't know to what extent this counts, but I know Latin well enough myself to use it regularly on another language forum. Using a dictionary, of course, and I usually have to double-check and make sure I didn't screw up the grammar; it usually works but not always.
More relevantly, though, I think you might find
this Reddit discussion kind of interesting. Not exactly authoritative, but still something. Two quotes that caught my eye:
Quote:
That all said, the community of people trying to actually speak and use a "living" Latin is growing, which is rather good. As to estimates for how many people in the world can speak truly fluent Latin, I'd say 100 is possibly a generous estimate, though there are surely many, many more who can speak Latin at a level below fluency.
Quote:
While a lot of people have some Latin from their school days, most will not have learnt it as a living language and only a small minority will have learnt enough to be able to hold a spoken conversation let alone to fluency. That being said, there are a small number of institutions and programmes which do treat Latin as a living language or even as an everyday language and some of these are long enough or in-depth enough to produce fluent speakers. Given the number of these programmes operating, the opportunities to use Latin outside these programmes, the rate of decline in language skills over periods of disuse, and the length of the average lifespan, I would guess that there are at least a couple of thousand people fluent in Latin and possible as many as a few tens of thousands. I would also expect a majority to be in the Catholic church.
Qwynegold wrote:
Ancient Greek. I haven't found the slightest guesstimate.
One tricky thing about estimating the number of people who know Ancient Greek in particular is this (towards the end of the (English
) Wikipedia article on Ancient Greek; this of course is a problem rather different from the problem of estimating how many people know Latin):
Quote:
Ancient Greek is also used by organizations and individuals, mainly Greek, who wish to denote their respect, admiration or preference for the use of this language. This use is sometimes considered graphical, nationalistic or funny. In any case, the fact that modern Greeks can still wholly or partly understand texts written in non-archaic forms of ancient Greek shows the affinity of modern Greek language to its ancestral predecessor.
Qwynegold wrote:
Now, being dead languages, Latin and Ancient Greek probably don't have any L1 speakers, but you never know. There are supposed to be some people who are teaching their children Cornish as their first languages, and then there was that one case of a kid who was taught Klingon. But L2 numbers are of course more important for Latin and AG.
There is indeed at least one claim I've found of
children being raised speaking Latin. I'm not so sure about Ancient Greek; what I keep finding with regards to that is that Ancient Greek is intelligible to some degree to Modern Greek-speakers and that Pontic Greek, spoken by "as few as 5,000 people," is considered the one living variety that is closest to Ancient Greek. (Wikipedia has its estimate for the number of native speakers of Pontic Greek at "778,000 (2009-2015)").
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I'll have to investigate further when I get to a computer. I'm using my smartphone right now, and it's really cumbersome.
