I recently was going over some data compiled by the Ethnologue and soon discovered that the number of speakers listed exceeded the population for certain countries/regions. Due to diasporas and communities of expats throughout the world, this did not altogether surprise me, but knowing that many countries are inhabited with people speaking many different languages, it made me wonder what percentage of inhabitants within each country spoke the official language of the country.
In the process, I have found that tracking down these percentages is proving to be a bit difficult. Thus far, I've resorted to cobbling them together from a number of different sources and even making an educated guess for some of them. This is not the ideal solution for collecting these figures, especially since I've already seen some pretty wide discrepancies. For example, one source told me that only 72 percent of Spain's population speaks Spanish, while another told me that this percentage is 98.8 percent.
Have you tried the CIA World Factbook?
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2098.html
The discrepancies you've found may very likely be due to differences in how "speaking a language" is defined. How much does someone have to know before they are labeled as speaking the language? In some cases it might mean that they have some rudimentary language skills; at the other extreme, it might be referring only to people who grew up with that language as their primary language. In terms of the number of speakers in Ethnologue, if you are looking up by country, the total number of speakers of various languages will exceed the number of people in the country because most people in the world are bilingual or multilingual. If you look up by language it will show people all over the world who speak that language.
You could also try SIL International, which is pretty good on minority languages, and has developed parameters for measuring societal language status.
http://www.sil.org/
Your question has touched on an issue which I think is of fundamental importance in language studies around the world at present. Figures are bandied around that are highly unreliable and often self-contradictory but at the same time they have a significant influence on research and even government policy.
The points made above about bilingualism etc are absolutely valid and I would suggest a very cautious approach to any quantification of language ability on nation state levels. Of course we need some kind of indication, but it should remain just that: a most approximate indication of a much more complex (and emergent) phenomenon.
Self reporting has a certain value in this (e.g. from census information perhaps) but is of itself subjective and maybe not completely free from political interference. Otherwise we find ourselves relying on school leaving exams and government figures. And it is worth bearing in mind that these numbers are sometimes used to formulate international 'league tables' and the like.
Unesco's Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (both hard copy and website) might also be useful.
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