Re: how many arabs do exist ?

[Youcef Rabah Rahal <rahal at arabeyes dot org>]

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On Sunday 21 March 2004 08:27, Musab Al-Rawi wrote:
> From: Arafat Medini <lumina at silverpen dot de>
>
> >Salam,
> >
> >for gome 2.6 release I was asked to say how many ppl speak the arabic
> >language, so minorites aside, how many arabic do exist ?
> >Any help pls?
> >
> >yours
> >Arafat
>
> poeple who live in middle east (speak arabic by default) are more than one
> billion,
> add to that islamic countries such as pakistan, india, indonisia etc who
> need to learn arabic in order to pray and worship God as muslims.
> of course people of the second group most of them don't speak arabic
> fluently and some they dont even speak arabic at all.... BUT u can say that
> there are more than billion people who speak
> arabic and u noone can say that u r wrong :)

I do, sorry ;-)

Arafat, I think you'll need to find the statistics of each of the countries 
that have Arabic as an official language (Arab League, not only middle east 
;-) and do the sum. There will be around a few hundred millions (but I'm sure 
it's less than 1 billion). You'll find that Arabic is one of the five/six 
most spoken languages in the world.

Well, if you add people that may need Arabic without really speaking it, I 
agree that the number may grow to 1 billion. But we're talking about speakers 
only.

Salam,

- -- 
Youcef R. Rahal
Arabeyes.org
http://www.arabeyes.org/~rahal
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