By Kim Da-ye
Korean is the 13th most widely language in the world, according to the National Institute of the Korean Language, Wednesday.
The institute said Korean's global ranking in terms of the number of speakers jumped to 13th from 18th, citing survey results from language research website Ethnologue.
Korean is spoken by 77.2 million speakers in five countries.
The 77.2 million Korean language speakers include 48.4 million South Koreans, 23.3 million North Koreans, 2.71 million in China, 905,000 in Japan and 42,400 in Russia. The population also comprises Korean speakers living abroad including Koreans in the U.S.
Korean is ranked just behind the standard German, spoken in Germany and 17 other countries, and before French, spoken by 75 million in France and 50 other countries.
The five most spoken languages are Chinese with 1.2 billion speakers, Spanish with 414 million, English with 335 million, Hindi with 260 million and Arabic with 237 million.
The institute said in a press release that Korean's ranking improved because it requested last November the Ethnologue to update its data with the latest one from Statistics Korea.
The previous edition was based on the population of South and North Korea in 1986. It increased from 66.4 million to 77.2 million, the institute said.
The Ethnologue accepted the suggestion, and applied changes in the latest date unveiled on April 30, the institute said.
"Korean and Turkish are the only two languages whose number of speakers increased by more than 10 million in this update. And they are the only languages that had climbed up by five ranks or more," the institute said.
Before the update was made, Korean was behind Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Vietnamese.
The Ethnologue is run by SIL International, a Christian non-profit organization based in Dallas, Texas.
각종 언어 관련 공식 통계로 활용되는 언어정보 제공 사이트 에스놀로그(Ethnologue, http://www.ethnologue.com)가 한국어 사용자 수를 종전 세계 18위에서 13위로 상향 조정했다.
국립국어원은 지난해 11월 에스놀로그가 제공하는 한국어 사용자 관련 정보에서 오류를 확인, 통계청 자료를 근거로 에스놀로그 편집진에게 정보 수정을 요청한 결과 지난달 30일 공개된 개정판에 이같은 내용이 반영됐다고 14일 밝혔다.
이전에는 베트남어, 프랑스어, 타밀어, 마라티어, 텔루구어 등이 한국어보다 사용자 수가 많은 언어로 명시됐으나 개정판에는 이들 언어보다 한국어의 사용자 수가 많은 것으로 수정됐다.
아울러 종전에는 1986년 자료를 참조해 한국어 사용자 수가 6천640만명으로 현실과 맞지 않았으나 개정판은 2010년 전후 자료를 토대로 사용자 수를 7천720만명으로 조정했다.
에스놀로그에 따르면 올해 4월30일 현재 사용자가 가장 많은 언어는 중국어(11억9천700만명)이며 스페인어(4억1천400만명), 영어(3억3천500만명), 힌디어(2억6천만명), 아랍어(2억3천700만명)가 뒤를 이었다.
개정판에서 사용자 수가 1천만명 이상 상향 조정된 언어는 한국어와 터키어 둘뿐이다.
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