Ethnologue, by SIL International, has issued the ranking of the more studied languages in the world and, as newspapers report, Italian is in 4° place, after English, Spanish and Chinese!
On a global scale, Italian is in 21° place among the spoken languages, with more than 67 million people using it. The interesting thng is that, thanks to the huge immigration abroad, it is considered a mothertongue for many speakers in 26 different countries in the world, and this is a specifici record of the Italian language.
Beyond rankings and records, take a look at the interesting sites www.sil.org and www.ethnologue.org where you can find lots of information about the Italian language and about all the languages of the world.
