Most spoken languages worldwide

I recently found an interesting statistic/ image about 'Most spoken language worldwide'...

The size of circle in the image below indicates the relative rank of that language (in terms of number of speakers worldwide) - Click to enlarge:

I found it a bit surprising to see so many Indian languages in those big circles...it means the so-called 'regional' or 'native' languages too rank higher than many other 'national languages'!

Now just out of curiosity I researched this a bit further and found that there are 2-3 different versions of these ranks (and similar versions of number of speakers too)...and that is bound to happen because no system can measure this to the exact level of details.

So here are few of these links:

http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm

http://www.krysstal.com/spoken.html

Though the ranking and estimate of no. of speakers changes according to every list, one thing is for sure - that Indian languages rate very high among the list; many of the languages are in top 30. My mother tongue Marathi is ranked 16th, 18th and 23rd respectively according to three different lists, with an estimated 71 million speakers worldwide...

71 million!!! That is a lot...to put it in perspective, it is higher than entire population of countries like France, the UK, South Africa, Spain, Canada and many more (Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population)

So 'Marathi manoos' (Marathi speaking person) need not feel inferior or subservient to anybody else...he should be proud of speaking one of the most spoken languages in the world!

Is Raj Thackeray aware of these stats? He could do a lot with this info...

~ Kaustubh