"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.)<p>These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once.<p>But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them.<p>So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
Original statements that led to this discussion<p>>><i>Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian</i><p>><i>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.</i><p>The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does.<p>Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers?<p>Put up or shut up.<p><pre><code> Russia 143,500,000
Ukraine 45,490,000
Poland 38,530,000
Czechia 10,200,000
Belarus 9,498,700
Bulgaria 7,265,000
Serbia 7,164,000
Slovakia 5,414,000
Croatia 4,253,000
Bosnia and 3,829,000
Herzegovina
Slovenia 2,060,000
Montenegro 621,383
</code></pre>
The people here ranting about how heated the topic is seem to be the people who want the topic to be heated, I'm thinking Putin knob polishers.<p>What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian?<p>Wikipedia says <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine</a> (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two:<p><pre><code> Ukrainian 32,577,468 67.53%
Russian 14,273,670 29.59%
</code></pre>
wikipedia also says as of 2023 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language</a><p><pre><code> 32 million Ukrainian as 1st language
6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language
</code></pre>
you see? nobody is heated up. And soon, the remaining Russian speakers will be able to learn Ukrainian in school making the problem go away completely.