As a follow-up to my earlier posting... I've scraped the population figures for every language that has them available in Ethnologue. That turns out to be 6,305 languages, and the result is here. If you sum up the all the populations, it comes to a total of 6,211,860,710 speakers (keeping in mind that many people speak more than one language; and of course that the figures are all very rough).
I also parsed out the years that Ethnologue attaches to the population numbers, and those are included. They update a lot of their population numbers whenever they release a new edition of Ethnologue, so most of them come from the 1990s and 2000s, but one could conceivably still learn something by comparing decades. E.g., do populations from the 1990s tend to be larger than populations from the 2000s?
Also, it seems that earlier editions of Ethnologue remain archived on their site, so one could possibly track population change within individual languages that way. Unfortunately, once you go about two editions back, things start to get messy because they hadn't yet settled on the ISO 639-3 standard for language identifiers.
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