We haven’t even yet acknowledged the unreliability of data sources, collected at different times by different institutions. “Hindi” is also used as a catchall term to cover numerous dialects and sub-dialects.

More troubling is the fact that what we refer to simply as “Chinese” is actually a whole family of languages conveniently lumped into a single category.

What constitutes a language or a dialect is hotly contested stuff. One small caveat: Assigning hard data, in the form of “X million native speakers,” to any of these languages is practically impossible. We can say with some confidence that Mandarin, English, Spanish and Arabic will make an appearance (and roughly in what order), but there are some surprises, too! Would you have guessed that Bengali is in the top 10 most spoken languages? Philological problems exist in the grammar of signs inscribed on a prehistoric stone or a shamanic drum no less than they do in the transmission of a text from one old manuscript to another.Determining what are the most spoken languages in the world is a more difficult task than you might imagine. The journal is open to a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches, from the study of linguistic evolution to literary interpretation, from textual criticism to the investigation of texts and ethnotexts, from etymological reconstructions to the cognitive analyses of archaeological facies. Philology promotes all efforts to go beyond the traditional boundaries of our habitual fields of enquiry, with the purpose of accomplishing anti-dogmatic and unprejudiced tools for facing the challenges of contemporaneity. To this end, we encourage constant dialogue with the methodologies of other disciplines, including linguistics, cultural anthropology, archaeology, paleoethnology, genetics and cultural biology. We propose that the contemporary world be understood in its multicultural complexity, and thus that philology be re-founded as a relevant social science. The journal aspires to challenge and reformulate the expression of philological studies in the present day. Philology is an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of human traditions as they emerge from oral, written, carved, painted, digital, performed, ancient, contemporary texts.

Ancient numbers in different languages