Number of speakers of Catalán falls just behind those of Kinyarwanda and Zulu

(from Friday's La Vanguardia)

The Catalonian government ministry announced today that worldwide (i.e., Catalonia, the principality of Andorra, the Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza), Valencia (although there they call it "Valencian"), the town of L'Alguer in Sardinia, bits of southwestern France (Perpignan, I am told) and in the autonomous regions, within Spain, of Aragon and Murcia (just to the west of Valencia) there are 9 million strong catalanoparlantes, just behind speakers of Kinyarwanda (Rwanda) and Zulu (KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa) – and one place above speakers of Bulgarian, Tartarian and Uyghur (a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang).

Funny, but one doesn’t see throngs of Tartars storming the gates of the EU Parliament demanding that their medieval language be embraced across the union.

For the record, the 23 official languages of the European Union are:

български (Bălgarski) - BG - Bulgarian
Čeština - CS - Czech
Dansk - DA - Danish
Deutsch - DE - German
Eesti - ET - Estonian
Elinika - EL - Greek
English - EN
Español - ES - Spanish
Français - FR - French
Gaeilge - GA - Irish
Italiano - IT - Italian
Latviesu valoda - LV - Latvian
Lietuviu kalba - LT - Lithuanian
Magyar - HU - Hungarian
Malti - MT - Maltese
Nederlands - NL - Dutch
Polski - PL - Polish
Português - PT - Portuguese
Română - RO - Romanian
Slovenčina - SK - Slovak
Slovenščina - SL - Slovene
Suomi - FI - Finnish
Svenska - SV - Swedish