Appendix 3

Number of speakers in the studied languages

Different hypothesis have been studied and then rejected. Effectiveley, the majority of them could not have been used because they did not reflect the reality. It would have been restrictive, for example, to use only to the «official language» criterion: it would have included millions of people having English, Portuguese or English for their official language, but had, for various reasons, difficulties to practice them ( like Indians, Angolans, Zairians…). On the other hand, it would exclude some important communities living in countries where the official language is not their mother tongue (like United States Spanish-speakers). In the same way, considering only the populations that have one of the studied languages for their mother tongue, we would have ignored the millions of persons mastering perfectly one of the target languages - that in this case would be the official language - in addition to their mother tongue (as it is the case in Africa, in India, in the United States…).

Otherwise, we have to point out that the six target languages have been examined according to following three categories :

1. Italian and Rumanian: languages with clearly delimited diffusion, the number of speakers outside the main zones is therefore with little significance;
2. English, French and Portuguese have a special status because of their large expansion: at the same time official languages and/or mother tongues in many countries, they are also the official languages of nations where the majority of the population do not speak them as mother tongue – in this case they have a role of common language. Moreover, they are educational languages in some States
3. ^{7. Educational language and not taught language. Thus, French is the educational language in Tunisia, Morocco and in Mauritania, countries where it is not the official language.}