
A world of languages - prismatic
http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages
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realusername
So it's not the first time this chart is actually posted on HN but actually
almost everything is wrong on it. German does not include Austria, French does
not include African countries, Chinese should be splitted, English and Russian
numbers are way too low (I suspect at least half of the population of Ukraine
speaks Russian). And there is I'm sure lots of other mistakes.

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glup
The premise of a countable number of languages should tip off the reader that
this is mostly for entertainment value; Africa appears to be entirely missing
(bad data source?). I like the visualization though, in that it relates
nation-states to linguistic identity. It shows a generally strong
correspondence between these two variables, with some outliers, generally
related to colonial history: people in India speak many languages; Spanish is
spoken by people in many nations.

~~~
bryanlarsen
But that correspondence is artificial. For example, the Latin languages are
more similar than the Chinese dialects. The main reason why Spanish is a
language and Mandarin is a dialect is political.

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dcsan
this assumes one language per country. it would be more interesting to see a
multilingual visualisation, eg how many people are able to communicate in
english vs. french, even if it's not their first language. that would give a
good idea which languages are winning the homogenization.

also cantonese and mandarin people cannot understand each other, despite
sharing some written characters, so lumping them together seems inaccurate,
like lumping spanish and italians together because they have the same script.

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DonaldFisk
It does say "'Chinese' as macrolanguage includes different languages and
dialects", probably to avoid arguments about whether they're languages or
dialects.

Cantonese is a dialect of Yuht Yúh (粵語), which is, as you say, a distinct
language as it is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese.
Though Cantonese speakers usually write in Standard Chinese (i.e. the written
form of Mandarin), Yuht Yúh also has its own distinct written form
([https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B2%B5%E8%AA%9E](https://zh-
yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B2%B5%E8%AA%9E)), as it often uses different words
from Mandarin.

It's interesting to compare with the Italic languages (Italian, Spanish,
Catalan, Portuguese, French, and Romanian). These are similarly far apart as
the Chinese 'dialects'. The Chinese situation is as if the Roman Empire never
collapsed, and the Italic language speakers continued to use Classical Latin
as a written language, then about 100 years ago decided to replace Latin with
Spanish as the written standard throughout the Empire, as it was the most
widely spoken language.

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xigency
Well, that's certainly the best linguistic analogy I've heard in a while.

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xigency
6.3 billion people included in the study? Why does that seem dishonest. Maybe
I'm one out of seven?

