Linguistic demography

Linguistic demography is the statistical study of languages among all populations.

Finally, in many countries, insufficient census data add to the difficulties.

Demolinguistics is a branch of Sociology of language observing linguistic trends as affected by population distribution and redistribution and by the status of societies.

The following table compares the estimates of Comrie (1998) and Weber (1997)[1] (number of native speakers in millions).

This table shows that for the world's largest languages, it is impossible to give an estimate of the number of native speakers with a certainty better than maybe 10% or 20% or so.