The only two outer languages with more than one billion (1,000,000,000) speakers in the 1990’s are "Mandarin" Chinese or Putonghua (the official language of the most populous nation on earth) and English (the most widely used and most widely studied language of the world). Around the year 2000, the title of "the most spoken and heard language on earth" alternates between these two languages within each twenty-four hour cycle. When the sun is over the western Pacific, the national language of China is the most in use. When the sun is over the Atlantic and China sleeps, English takes the lead. The world’s second most spoken language also alternates daily between two languages, each with more than 450 million voices. These are [59] Hindi+ Urdu, together with Panjabi, which are interintelligible when heard in spite of their different scripts; and [51] Español/Spanish, together with Português/Portuguese, which are largely interintelligible when read and when Spanish is heard (although Portuguese is less easily understood by speakers of Spanish). Three languages have a total of between two and four hundred million voices each, these being Russian, Bengali and Arabic. Russian is also largely intelligible to speakers of some other Slavic languages, especially Belarussian and Ukrainian. Bengali and Arabic, on the other hand, are less unified within themselves, and there are sometimes difficulties of comprehension between different spoken varieties of each. In the range between one hundred and two hundred million voices are four further languages (or in one case a pair of languages): Japanese and Malay+Indonesian in Asia and the Pacific, Portuguese in South America, Europe and Africa, German in Europe and French throughout the world. French is notable for several reasons: in being the only language apart from English with representation in all continents, in being the official language of more nations than any other language apart from English, and in having such widespread use and prestige as the world’s second "global" language, in spite of its modest number of primary speakers (around 60 million) situated largely in western Europe and Quebec.See table on pp. 291-92