A proportional visualization of the world's most popular languages

http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/a-proportional-visualization-of-the-worlds-most-popular-languages.html

by rshaban • 11 years ago

29 35 11 years ago

rshaban• 11 years ago

"As you look through Lopéz’s visual, you’ll want to keep one thing in mind: Although the 23 languages visualized above are collectively spoken by 4.1 billion people, there are at least another 6700 known languages alive in the world today."

andybak• 11 years ago

Why are Hindi and Urdu listed separately but many Chinese languages combined? I have a hunch that there are greater differences within the Chinese group than between (spoken) Hindi and Urdu.

EDIT - The comments on the page point out several other flaws and oversights.

contingencies• 11 years ago

"produced by Alberto Lucas Lopéz, on behalf of the South China Morning Post" .. maybe related.

cbd1984• 11 years ago

Why are Hindi and Urdu listed separately but many Chinese languages combined?

Because the last thing people interested in languages should care about is mutual intelligibility. Politics is much more important.

There is no sarcasm here.

azurezyq• 11 years ago

Interestingly. Cantonese and Mandarin share the same scripting, though spoken quite differently. As a Chinese who doesn't speak Cantonese, I never found it difficult in reading the shop names in HK/Canton. well, it seems that Hindi and Urdu is just the opposite.

I agree it is terribly made...

jordigh3• 11 years ago

In the graphic it reads, "Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people."

wtf? What's the difference between mother tongue and native tongue? Both terms redirect to "first language" on Wikipedia, or what linguists refer to as "L1".

edit: Oh! The sentence was meant to be parsed that it was more than 50 million speakers per each of the 23 languages, not more than 50 million for the whole 23 languages combined. Man that was difficult for me to parse. I thought it was trying to say something about the difference between mother and native tongues.

restalis• 11 years ago

I guess they are the same and this choice of different terms was purely aesthetic.

jordigh3• 11 years ago

I suppose then that "more than 50 million people" is correct because 4.1 billion is greater than 50 million?

veganjay• 11 years ago

As others said, the graph is inaccurate. The best thing I found about the article is the link to "Learn 48 Languages Online for Free": www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons

realusername• 11 years ago

Most of the figures here looks wrong, Chinese is almost in one block (where is Cantonese ?), French numbers are too low (Africa is not even counted), Russian seems also too way low, the real figure is almost twice as this, English is also too low. I also think there is more German speakers in Austria than Poland (you can't see Austria).

phillc73• 11 years ago

Is that unnamed dot in "German" meant to represent Austria? It is currently unlabeled, so just guessing.

Australia's population is also around 22million, not 15 million. I struggle to believe there are 7 million non-English speakers in Auatralia.

filmor• 11 years ago

Yeah the numbers don't seem to be quite correct. According to Wikipedia there are between 90 and 105 million native German speakers.

Mithaldu4• 11 years ago

The fact that this only represents mother tongues makes it entirely useless of getting any real picture. In many countries, germany included, english being tought as early as grade school. For me personally and quite a few people i know, english is used 50% or more over the day due to our occupation. I doubt any of the chinese languages are picked up as secondary languages by anything remotely approaching the amount of secondary learners english has. (Consider for example that english is so pervasive and wide-spread in india that india has de-facto its own dialect of english, much like various places in the us or australia.)

bhaak5• 11 years ago

Urks, this is another chart using the highly questionable data from Ethnologue.

For example German, it mostly counts the inhabitants of Germany (native and L2 speakers) as speaking "Standard German".

Austria and Switzerland have almost no "Standard German" but "Bavarian" and "Alemannic". Which makes no sense at all. They claim to group their language families "based primarily on mutual intelligibility".

But at least with German, this is clearly wrong. Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other (with Swiss German, the problem is a bit more complicated but it is generally acknowledged as a dialect of German).

With the "mutual intelligibility" argument AFAIK Chinese should be split into several languages.

If you remember that "The Ethnologue is published by Dallas, Texas-based SIL International [...], a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies numerous minority languages to facilitate language development and to work with the speakers of such language communities to translate portions of the Bible into their language."[Quote from Wikipedia] some of their decision make more sense.

All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different. But Swiss Germans read mostly Standard German texts, there is very little literature written in Swiss Germans in print or online (besides texting or other informal communication).

So take Ethnologue's data and this chart with more than the usual grain of salt.

Mithaldu4• 11 years ago

Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other

Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ...

bhaak5• 11 years ago

> Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other
Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ...

"Not wanting to understand each other" is a cultural and political thing and not due to linguistical issues. ;-)

panglott2• 11 years ago

There's just no unambiguous way to distinguish various dialects, sociolects, and other linguistics varieties into discrete "languages" easily.

"Mutual intelligibility" is also problematic. In a highly multilingual community, people may have a high passive knowledge of another clearly distinct language that they can understand each other fine when speaking distinct languages/varieties.

tokenadult• 11 years ago

Yours is a good comment on the unreliability of Ethnologue for these kinds of language comparisons. I'll jump in here with a response to one part of your comment near the end.

All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different.

That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.

I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...

[4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm

Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.

raister• 11 years ago

0.8% of France is speaking Portuguese? How?

Cirruz• 11 years ago

There was a massive flow of Portuguese immigrants to France in the 60s and 70s! That percentage is even higher in countries like Luxembourg and Switzerland.

abrowne• 11 years ago

Tony Judt said it best: Under Salazar, "Portugal was largely dependent upon the export or re-export of primary commodities, including its own people." (Postwar, pg 511, https://books.google.com/books?id=xE1hBBF37kwC&pg=PA511&lpg=... )

ommunist• 11 years ago

The question is how polyglots are accounted in this graph?

j_s• 11 years ago

What 2 or 3 languages should my children learn to reach the largest populations in the year 2030?

Right now my vote is English (default), Spanish, and Chinese, but I don't have much of an understanding of how various languages can be easier to learn together.

clueless123• 11 years ago

If you know Spanish, you will understand written Portuguese and Italian quite well, so you get those as a free bonus. On the other hand, Chinese with Mandarin and it's many dialects (Cantonese, Shanghainese etc..) is a whole new game.. with a bonus that they all use the same written language.

jcranmer• 11 years ago

It depends on what you mean. A language like Japanese is spoken by over 100 million, but it's spoken basically nowhere outside of a single large, populous country. English, Spanish, French, and Arabic collectively constitute an official or major spoken language of effectively most of the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and the Middle East (these are 4 of the 6 official languages of the UN for a reason).

East Asia is by far the most populous corner of the world, but if you pick East Asian languages, you tend to lock yourself into one-language-one-culture groups.

panglott2• 11 years ago

Ultimately, the problem is that most people in the world are bilingual.

Many Europeans are bilingual in two or more national languages, especially English. Most Indians are bilingual in a regional language and English and/or Hindi. Most Chinese people are bilingual in Mandarin and one or more regional Chinese dialects (which would be "languages" if they had an army and a navy).

English especially suffers from this misrepresentation, since so many use it as an interlanguage, and Mandarin benefits because so many people use it in school and official contexts.

But trying to visualize languages by speaker count without accounting for language boundaries and multilingualism makes for something that's more a misrepresentation than a representation.

jbandela1• 11 years ago

Also I think English in under-represented. India is not in the English block and I would estimate there are at least high tens of millions of English speakers there.

A proportional visualization of the world's most popular languages

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