I'm trying to creep back to daily blogging, but don't go expecting extra material for your time. It's been a long hard struggle finding anything out today, particularly with about four hours taken up by the Gasquet v Murray clash of the titans just down the road at Wimbledon. Murray probably deserved to win just for his sheer persistence, even though Gasquet fell apart like wet cake after the third set tie-break. Eventually, with another corking episode of the reborn Big Brother ripping along in the background, I have found the following:
Hindustani is the third most spoken language in the world.
A language that, shamefully enough, I incorrectly thought was actually called Hindi, is spoken by 497 million people worldwide, and is only surpassed narrowly by English (508 million) and more comfortably by Mandarin (spoken by more than a billion people). It's interesting to me that there is only a difference of 9 million between a language spoken largely amongst citizens of one nation and a language spoken all over the world. It is in fact the popularity of English in India that has prevented its most widely-spoken language from reaching the dizzy heights that Mandarin has achieved in China. I got this list from List Universe, a nifty site with several slightly more subjective lists, including the ten most influential metal bands (no Metallica? what gives?) and various other trivia. You can enjoy that, while I go and shout at the obnoxious shits on my telly...
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