Most spoken languages in 1492 AD?

According to linguistics. Venetian and Tuscan, as another poster mentioned, literally belong to different branches of the Romance languages. In addition, the Spezia-Rimini line that runs through Italy also means that Lombard and Neapolitan are too different to be considered as part of one language.
Using that logic you would put Venetian closer to French than to Tuscan, which is absolutely not the case. The branch system is also being criticized for good reasons, it's a dialect continuum not some sort tree system like you would use to classify branches like Germanic and Romance.

Also I'm curious which linguist say Tuscan and Venetian are absoltuely 2 different languagues but all of Arabic, Mandarin and Hindustani aren't.
 
Actually Arabic is considered linguistically to be different languages as well because it's well established that certain varieties are mutually incomprehensible. IIRC Mandarin is one language though, while there are multiple Chinese languages, Mandarin itself is pretty unified. There's some debate on Hindustani as to whether it's still one language or whether Hindi and Urdu have diverged enough to be linguistically separate now.

Anyway, not sure what you mean by "closer." Venetian shares more similarities with Tuscan than French due to language contact, but that doesn't make them the same language because that's the same criteria that gives Bulgarian and Romanian similarities for instance. I don't think varieties of separate genealogical linguistic descent are generally considered to form the same language, even if they are sometimes referred to as "dialects" from a political or nationalistic sense.
 
Actually Arabic is considered linguistically to be different languages as well because it's well established that certain varieties are mutually incomprehensible. IIRC Mandarin is one language though, while there are multiple Chinese languages, Mandarin itself is pretty unified. There's some debate on Hindustani as to whether it's still one language or whether Hindi and Urdu have diverged enough to be linguistically separate now.

Anyway, not sure what you mean by "closer." Venetian shares more similarities with Tuscan than French due to language contact, but that doesn't make them the same language because that's the same criteria that gives Bulgarian and Romanian similarities for instance.
Mandarin is almost a millennia old, it has various dialects that are unintelligible, at least today. When talking about being able to understand and speak the standard language, it's far from the case where Mandarin speakers can automatically speak it or even understand it(wiki says just a bit more than 50% of Mandarin speakers could understand the standard in 1950 or so).

I'm not talking about Hindi or Urdu, it's not important for 1492 anyway, I'm talking about the various local dialects, especially on the extremes.

It's not simply contact(which is kinda an understatement, more like continuous uninterruped contact since the fall of the Roman empire) but also because isoglosses aren't the only way to classify dialects, as far as I know portions of diallects classified as Gallo-Italic are south of the line.

Maybe @LSCatilina could offer arguments that make more sense for the historical period given I've argued mostly only on classification as I know little of when the differences developed.
 
Making a clear cut a continuum of dlalects (partially united by a common lettred elite) and bona fide language is irrelevant before the rise of nationalism, IMO, because they were effectively the same as long contemporaries were concerned.
 
According to what standard though? Are people running intelligibility tests of which I'm not aware off?

Well, ultimately, the division between language and dialect is ultimately arbitrary, this is often an agreed upon point. However, for ease of speech, we separate these into categories. Otherwise, we could feasibly say that Arabic is a dialect of some ancient Semitic tongue that was progenitor and same for the myriad of other Semitic tongues.

The reason is, a dialect can be misunderstood by a speaker of a standard of any given language, in a similar way to a different language. In the same vein, we may say that considering the concept of progenitor languages of groups, that these separate as dialects of that tongue and gain less and less mutual intelligibility. Though, the idea that there is an objective line between language and dialect, is more or less arbitrary.

Venetian: El tóxo l’vołéa dormir

Italian: Il ragazzo voleva dormire

French: Le garçon voulait dormir

Por: O moço queria dormir

Castilian: El chico quería dormir

Catalán: El noi volia dormir

As a point of understanding between a single phrase and how some Neo-Latin languages differentiate.
 
Using that logic you would put Venetian closer to French than to Tuscan, which is absolutely not the case. The branch system is also being criticized for good reasons, it's a dialect continuum not some sort tree system like you would use to classify branches like Germanic and Romance.

Also I'm curious which linguist say Tuscan and Venetian are absoltuely 2 different languagues but all of Arabic, Mandarin and Hindustani aren't.

Which Arabic has differentiated? One can perfectly understand for instance Arabic that existed within the Abbasid Caliphate. There is a difference that begins to increase moving west of Egypt wherein the understanding is lower and lower to the point that one reaches Mauritania. However, Gulf Arabic is not an entirely separate language from Levantine Arabic or whichever region you wish to take. These regions moving west of Egypt, had much lower proximity to the heartlands of the Islamic world. Thus, their differentiation is understood.
 
In 1492 (and really up until very much recent times), there was just so little standardization of languages for this to be at all a simple question. I personally am opposed to "Italian" being included as a language in this hypothetical list of the largest languages at the time mainly due to the lack of a common, standardized, prestige form of the language, and the extreme gulfs of difference between the different languages of Italy (Sardinian as opposed to Tuscan as opposed to Venetian as opposed to Neapolitan). Arabic definitely has similar linguistic diversity, heck some people today in Morocco consider their dialect of Arabic as a completely distinct Berber-influenced language, but the big difference is the commonality shared by the relatively standardized Classical Arabic of the Qur'an which was used as the standard throughout the Islamic world and the Arabic speaking world. Arabic is definitely in the list of the largest languages.

I also agree with including Nahuatl- mesoamerica was one of the most populous regions of the Americas (another very populous region, the Mississippi, didn't have a single language as dominate as Nahuatl was in Mexico). Nahuatl sort of has a similar issue as Italian in that there's lots of smaller, regional dialects (should Pipil be included as Nahuatl?), but the upper-class Classical Nahuatl that was used by the nobility in Mesoamerica functions as a sort of unifying force that I could see used to include it like Arabic.

I don't have any specific numbers to actually base this on but in no particular order I think it is safe to assume the following languages would be included:
Han (Mandarin) Chinese
Wu Chinese
Arabic
Hindustani (sizable dialect continuum but the dialect of Delhi has already been pretty established in influence by 1492)
Bengali
French (Langue d'Oil)
German Dialects (though the rapid standardization of German falls out of this year, Germany is very populous and the beginning of the standardization happens soon after)
Nahuatl

Would any Turkic or African languages be included or are those regions just too sparsely inhabited? I'm not totally certain about Greek, Turkish, and Ruthenian/East Slavic but they could probably also be included. Persian probably would have been included if those dang Mongols hadn't happened just 200 years earlier, followed by Plague and then Timur right after.
 
Which Arabic has differentiated? One can perfectly understand for instance Arabic that existed within the Abbasid Caliphate. There is a difference that begins to increase moving west of Egypt wherein the understanding is lower and lower to the point that one reaches Mauritania. However, Gulf Arabic is not an entirely separate language from Levantine Arabic or whichever region you wish to take. These regions moving west of Egypt, had much lower proximity to the heartlands of the Islamic world. Thus, their differentiation is understood.
Well at the time of the Abbassid caliphate there seem to not have been as distinct dialect in Italian or other Romance languages either.
What about Yemeni or Omani Arabic and Syrian?
In 1492 (and really up until very much recent times), there was just so little standardization of languages for this to be at all a simple question. I personally am opposed to "Italian" being included as a language in this hypothetical list of the largest languages at the time mainly due to the lack of a common, standardized, prestige form of the language, and the extreme gulfs of difference between the different languages of Italy (Sardinian as opposed to Tuscan as opposed to Venetian as opposed to Neapolitan). Arabic definitely has similar linguistic diversity, heck some people today in Morocco consider their dialect of Arabic as a completely distinct Berber-influenced language, but the big difference is the commonality shared by the relatively standardized Classical Arabic of the Qur'an which was used as the standard throughout the Islamic world and the Arabic speaking world. Arabic is definitely in the list of the largest languages.

I also agree with including Nahuatl- mesoamerica was one of the most populous regions of the Americas (another very populous region, the Mississippi, didn't have a single language as dominate as Nahuatl was in Mexico). Nahuatl sort of has a similar issue as Italian in that there's lots of smaller, regional dialects (should Pipil be included as Nahuatl?), but the upper-class Classical Nahuatl that was used by the nobility in Mesoamerica functions as a sort of unifying force that I could see used to include it like Arabic.

I don't have any specific numbers to actually base this on but in no particular order I think it is safe to assume the following languages would be included:
Han (Mandarin) Chinese
Wu Chinese
Arabic
Hindustani (sizable dialect continuum but the dialect of Delhi has already been pretty established in influence by 1492)
Bengali
French (Langue d'Oil)
German Dialects (though the rapid standardization of German falls out of this year, Germany is very populous and the beginning of the standardization happens soon after)
Nahuatl

Would any Turkic or African languages be included or are those regions just too sparsely inhabited? I'm not totally certain about Greek, Turkish, and Ruthenian/East Slavic but they could probably also be included. Persian probably would have been included if those dang Mongols hadn't happened just 200 years earlier, followed by Plague and then Timur right after.
There were a prestige forms of Italian by 1492 as far as I know, Florentine being one of them. The printing press rapidly spread in usage in Italy, so there was that as well.

Nahuatl did not have 10 million speakers, Mesoamerica had 15-20 million people and it was highly decentralized linguistically, Nahuatl was far from being dominant.

I'm not sure about Bengali either, the Indian subcontinent as a whole had about 100 million people, so it can be either way, as far as I know the Eastern half of the Bengal was not yet densely populated, the expansion of the populaiton there being connected with the expansion of Islam and the Mughals.
 
I'm not sure about Bengali either, the Indian subcontinent as a whole had about 100 million people, so it can be either way, as far as I know the Eastern half of the Bengal was not yet densely populated, the expansion of the populaiton there being connected with the expansion of Islam and the Mughals.

Oh I did not know that about Bengali! I just assumed that the language would have similar prominence in the region due to how fertile the river delta is, encouraging population growth without many other major languages to compete with it in the region, but Mughal encouragement of the Bengali language is not something I took into account! Thanks for bringing that up!
 
Oh I did not know that about Bengali! I just assumed that the language would have similar prominence in the region due to how fertile the river delta is, encouraging population growth without many other major languages to compete with it in the region, but Mughal encouragement of the Bengali language is not something I took into account! Thanks for bringing that up!
In theory the River delta was not geographically the same as today either.

The Mughals did not encourage the Bengali language, it's just that during the rule of the Mughals the geography changed and the population of Eastern Bengal increased.
 
In Europe, we're probably looking at
- French
- Italian
- German

No way Italian can be on this list. Back then what is now Italy had a whole bunch of different languages, or dialects, and the language now known as Italian was Tuscan at the time. It was picked as the national language in 1861, and the process of turning it into Standardized Italian began.
 
I’m actually inclined to think that European languages would barely scrape into this list, given just how densely populated India and China were compared to Europe at this time.
 
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