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A comment on Help! Is This Arabic?. Parent comment

Re:Help! Is This Arabic? by zakki on Sunday February 26, 2023 @11:46PM (#34953080)
The writer most likely count the moslem population. Most moslem don't speak arabic but they recite quran (written in arabic) daily. Most of them will notice if a ال written as ل ا
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Re:Help! Is This Arabic? by jcranmer on Monday February 27, 2023 @12:31AM (#34953364)
Egypt has ~100 million people, the vast majority of whom are going to be native Arabic speakers. Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq also have ~40 million people each, again, most of whom are native Arabic speakers (of different varieties). Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen are no slouches either. In short 300 million native speakers of various Arabic languages is extremely plausible.

FWIW, the usual estimate for worldwide adherents to Islam is ~1 billion.

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Re:Help! Is This Arabic? by ask_b123 on Monday February 27, 2023 @01:28AM (#34953666)
FWIW, I am not a muslim nor a native Arabic speaker but I "can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree".

Though if your numbers are correct, 2 billion sounds way too high

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Re:Help! Is This Arabic? by zakki on Monday February 27, 2023 @03:07AM (#34954157)
PEW Research and Wikipedia estimate are 1.9B.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/01/27/the-future-o...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country

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Re:Help! Is This Arabic? by IncRnd on Monday February 27, 2023 @09:38AM (#34956911)
Those estimates are not for Arabic readers or speakers. They are for Muslim or Islam.
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