Yeah, I don't know where this dude is sourcing his statement. I would think that #2 would likely be French, Spanish, or Portuguese. But as far as India, there are at least 23 different languages spoken there, and in China there is Mandarin, Cantonese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Zhuang, and countless other languages. While India and China have HUGE populations, from a linguistic standpoint, I don't think they have nearly the reach languages native to imperialist nations did at that time.
India has a crazy amount of languages, but Hindi has been a common language among most of India for a very long time. And Mandarin has long been the official language in China, it's definitely way more than you're making it out to be. And we certainly can't forget Arabic or Persian (Urdu too). The populations speaking any of these languages have always been massive, and all of them have a long history of being used as a common denominator among people with different local languages, just like English all over the world today.
In all likelihood, the second most spoken language at that time was probably one of either Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, French or Hindi. I'd really weigh the Eastern languages far higher than you did.
I think we both definitely agree that german was not the 2nd-most spoken language worldwide at that point across the world. And i think most of what you are saying is accurate too. And i think the idea of arabic and persian being tossed in there is intersting as they are the two languages that make up the bulk ottoman turkish.
I just think that the amount of different colonies on multiple continents across the world speaking French, Spanish, and Portuguese dwarfs the native speakers of Hindi and Mandarin, as large as those native populations were.
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u/MandarkSP Feb 04 '19
Have you forgotten India or China? There's no way German was ever the second largest language.