Speaker count
An estimate of how many people speak a language. Always contested, always dated, never sufficient on its own.
UNESCO is blunt about this: “It is impossible to provide a valid interpretation of absolute numbers, but a small speech community is always at risk.” The number is listed as one factor among nine, and the only one recorded as a raw figure rather than a graded scale.
Three things make a count harder than it looks. It depends on who is counted as a speaker — fluency is a gradient, not a threshold. It ages: an estimate published in 2011 is still repeated as current in 2026. And it says nothing about transmission, which is what actually predicts a language’s future.
So a count belongs next to its source and its date, and neither is optional. On this Atlas an estimate that has no citation is shown with a visible “source needed” flag rather than presented as fact, and the build refuses a figure that has no source field at all.