The languages of China and the World

In Skypeland, a lot of people like to claim to be experts in various fields. A man whose company does a lot of business in South East Asia claimed that the business language of China is Hakkian, and the language of the Chinese peasants in the countryside is Cantonese. He said that the main second language of China is probably Tamil, although it could be English. (I believe he was referring to the dialect of the Hakka people, spoken by 34 million people and is the 32nd most popular language in the world. Cantonese, or Yue Chinese, is spoken mainly in Hong Kong and the region around Hong Kong and is spoken by 55-100 million people and is the 22nd most popular language in the world. Tamil is spoken mainly in Southern India and Sri Lanka and is spoken by 77 million people and is not remotely close to the 2nd most popular language in China, or even in India, where it is the 5th most popular language. There are 873 million native Mandarin speakers, and the second most common language in China is probably Wu with about 77 million native speakers. English has the 3rd greatest number of native speakers at 309 million, but the greatest number of total speakers at 1.1 billion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers )


A man from Scotland asked if it was not true that English was the most spoken language in the world. Others in the room disagreed and said it had to be Chinese, considering China and all the Chinatowns in America as well (This is clearly not true from the website above) . Someone said that clearly English is not a very influential language worldwide because there are so many Arabic skypecasts. (From the website above, there are about 1/3 as many Arabic speakers as English speakers).

An Englishman said that Indians always say the word "sorry" because they only speak "textbook English" and they have no experience in using English day to day and never deal with accents (This sounds like pure nonsense. How can someone from a country with dozens of languages never have to deal with accents? And what is "textbook English" ?) . He said that pidgin English is textbook English, and that pidgin English is called that because it makes people sound like pigeons. (There are many varieties of "pidgin English", but it is not called "pidgin English" because the people speaking it sound like birds. It is said that the term "pidgin" refers to the Chinese Pidgin word for "business".)

Someone else said that during the 1940s, more than 40 per cent of the people in the US spoke German, so it would have been very easy for the US if Hitler had won World War II (I find this claim very difficult to reconcile with the evidence. At the outbreak of World War I, about 6% of all US school children received instruction in German. However, after World War I, usage of German sharply declined, and presently there are about 0.5% of the US population that claim to speak German. At present, about 17.5% of all Americans are of German ancestry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_as_a_Minority_Language#German_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_in_the_United_States
).

The conversation turned to oil, and someone English said that the English Brent Crude had been squandered and was of low quality since it could only be refined to "two star" oil. He said that there was only 9 years of English oil left, and after that England would have to import its oil from Algeria.