Comparison Between Esperanto and Interlingua - Number of Speakers

Number of Speakers

Many Esperanto speakers assert that their language is the only constructed language during the last century to have more than some thousands of speakers. Only one other constructed language possibly passed this mark: Volapük, which allegedly had 200,000 speakers in 1890. Although no census has ever been undertaken, Esperanto speakers frequently place their numbers at somewhere between 100,000 to 3 million speakers. The number of Interlingua speakers is generally estimated between a few hundred and 1,500. It is worth noting that the actual number of speakers of a constructed language is very hard to measure, partly because they are not restricted to an area, which makes counting them virtually impossible, partly because it is hard to establish what precisely makes a person a speaker. Esperanto is the only constructed language with native speakers, numbering 200-2000 according to Ethnologue.

Read more about this topic:  Comparison Between Esperanto And Interlingua

Famous quotes containing the words number of, number and/or speakers:

    It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    You are the majority—in number and intelligence; therefore you are the force—which is justice. Some are scholars, others are owners; a glorious day will come when the scholars will be owners and the owners scholars. Then your power will be complete, and no man will protest against it.
    Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

    The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)