Languages by GDP

[null]

Learn Manchu before it dies.

The language was almost killed the by the Manchus themselves...They made Chinese an OFFICIAL language in 1728, by the order of the Emperor Yongzheng (雍正).

[kasa]

I can't believe a whole nation would abandon their culture and language like that, but they seemingly wanted nothing but to fit in with the Chinese. I would love to learn Manchu and help with its revitalization, like I will be with Cornish, which I am learning now. Have you any interest in Manchu? Most of the resources for learning it are in Chinese, so I would most likely learn that first, but I want to learn it too, not out of necessity.

[mōdgethanc]

Language shift is often a gradual process. In the case of Manchu, it took place over several centuries.

[kasa]

That is correct. Want a cookie?

[mōdgethanc]

As long as it doesn't have any nuts, yes.

[KingHarvest]

Allergic?

[mōdgethanc]

No, you'd think that, but the truth is I just don't really like cookies with nuts.

[Formiko]

No, you'd think that, but the truth is I just don't really like cookies with nuts.

I'm the same way. I'll eat a cookie with nuts, but I prefer not to. I don't like the texture.

[loqu]

I can't believe a whole nation would abandon their culture and language like that

an Irish friend of mine (who spoke no Irish) told me with a lot of sadness that the Irish themselves did that in the XIX century in favour of English. Don't know if that's 100% true (DelBoy? any other Irish here?).

[sa wulfs]

Well, back then if you spoke English they'd give you a potato.

[KingHarvest]

How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?

[KingHarvest]

Plus they could have worked out that whole situation by following Swift's modest proposal.

[Oleksij]

How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?

None.

[KingHarvest]

[sa wulfs]

Hahaha, that one cracks me up every time.
Nostalgia!

[Oleksij]

Hahaha, that one cracks me up every time.
Nostalgia!

I honestly didn't know that joke existed (but to anyone who's been through Irish secondary education the combination of 'Irish', 'potato' and 'death' quite logically rings The Famine).

[thabit]

Languages by GDP
This project was being made by me for many years sinse 1998. A lot of corrections were made. Now I am glad to make it public.
Methodology.
The percentage of every language for L1 speakers for every country was made. The languages included in the project are all languages with population 30000 or more within any one country. So countries and territories with population less than 30000 were also included and their languages were considered 100% (e. g. Palauan was considered 100% in Palau). The number of all languages included in report is now 1527 languages.
One of the difficulties was to distinguish languages and dialects. I considered all varieties wich have a common Dachsprache as one language, e. g. Chinese, Arabic, Italian, German, Hidi belt. Also standard languages which are very close to each other (about 97% or more of Swadesh or Leipzig-Jakarta list are common) were considered as one language, e. g. Serbo-Croatian, Malay-Indonesian, Rwanda-Rundi. But the quite distinct standard languages like Hindi and Urdu were considered different languages (about 90% common or even less) even if their vernacular varieties are similar. Languages with same name and same ethnicity usualy were considered one language even if they have several standard forms, e. g. Kurdish (Sorani and Kurmanji), Quechua, Azerbaijani (Northern and Southern).
The main sources for data were national censuses and Ethnologue. The data was studied and added after critical research.
If the combined percentage of speakers within one country wes less than 100%, the rest was added to the most spoken or official languages, because they are spoken by the rest population without a doubt. If the combined number was more than 100%, the numbers were reduced to make it 100%.
The first 50 languages of the project are
language Native Name GDP (millions$) 2013-2015
1 English English 19,393,427
2 Chinese 中文 10,876,553
3 Spanish Español 6,418,513
4 Japanese 日本語 4,900,615
5 German Deutsch 4,328,276
6 French Français 3,215,708
7 Portuguese Português 2,396,261
8 Arabic العربية 2,355,414
9 Italian Italiano 2,137,821
10 Russian Русский 1,802,875
11 Korean 한국어 1,464,986
12 Dutch Nederlands 1,002,228
13 Hindi हिन्दी 987,890
14 Turkish Türkçe 824,981
15 Polish Polski 573,471
16 Swedish Svenska 514,256
17 Malay Melayu-Indonesia 469,303
18 Norwegian Norsk 442,258
19 Bengali বাংলা 442,054
20 Thai ไทย 350,993
21 Javanese Jawa 330,629
22 Farsi فارسی 327,746
23 Danish Dansk 320,820
24 Panjabi پنجابی 313,808
25 Greek Ελληνικά 306,452
26 Finnish Suomi 252,740
27 Vietnamese Tiếng Việt 248,815
28 Tagalog Tagalog 230,731
29 Romanian Română 214,156
30 Serbo-Croatian Srpskohrvatski 208,967
31 Hebrew עברית 207,051
32 Czech Čeština 191,424
33 Urdu اردو 188,581
34 Tamil தமிழ் 180,141
35 Telugu తెలుగు 173,576
36 Azerbaijani Azərbaycanca 162,972
37 Marathi मराठी 161,397
38 Hungarian Magyar 157,184
39 Kazakh Қазақша 150,841
40 Kurdish كوردی 144,017
41 Sunda Sunda 129,937
42 Ukrainian Українська 128,287
43 Gujarati ગુજરાતી 122,774
44 Catalan Català 112,894
45 Zhuang Cuengh 112,779
46 Malayalam മലയാളം 93,942
47 Yoruba Yorùbá 89,671
48 Hausa Hausa 89,498
49 Slovak Slovenčina 85,484
50 Zulu isiZulu 80,527
I think this is the most accurate list in the WWWeb. The first 10 languages are similar in the mentioned Unicode page and in Wikipedia by number of users.

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[vijayjohn]

How did you determine the GDP?

[thabit]

The study on this topic may be found here:
https://www.academia.edu/69034365/World ... vs_Dialect

[vijayjohn]

It seems to us that the most adequate method of ranking languages in terms of importance is to rank them according to the GDP of the countries that speak them natively.

That doesn't tell you anything at all because it's falling into the language = country fallacy. It ignores all the people who speak that language outside such countries. By that standard, every single one of the hundreds of languages spoken in India is equally important even though only 23 of them even have any official status.

Besides, almost all the languages in your list are spoken natively in more than one country; how then do you determine the GDP associated with each of these languages? For any given language spoken in multiple countries, do you add the GDPs of those countries together?