
A proportional visualization of the world's most popular languages - rshaban
http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/a-proportional-visualization-of-the-worlds-most-popular-languages.html
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bhaak
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.

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Mithaldu
> Austrians and Germans have no problem understanding each other

Germans and Bavarians on the other hand ...

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bhaak
>> 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. ;-)

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Mithaldu
That is a completely un-called-for accusation. I've seen elderly bavarians
come up to Meck-Pomm and babble at the train attendant over their invalid
tickets in high speed in the deepest and most incomprehensible Boarisch
possible. There may be some people up here who don't even want to deal with
that, but the bigger issue is those bavarians who don't even try to speak
common german, or at least slow the fuck down.

~~~
bhaak
This is exactly the kind of culturing issue I was referring to.

Those elderly Bavarians were probably not aware that they aren't being
understood.

Either because they were too agitated to switch to Standard German or a toned
down Bavarian or because they just didn't know that they wouldn't be
understood.

If you lived your whole life in a place where the daily language of different
people range from deepest Bavarian to Standard German, it can happen that you
don't realize immediately that you speak in a hard to understood variant of
the local language as at home, a Standard German speaker is not a reliable
indicator that you won't be understood.

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Mithaldu
Agreeing with all of that. To be clear, my previous post was taking offense to
the "not _wanting_ to understand" part. I can guarantee that train attendents
want to understand, because every traveller taking up more than a specific
amount of time effectively reduces their salary due to bonus structuring. Many
people up here simply _can 't_ understand Boarisch because it's sufficiently
different to be its own language.

~~~
bhaak
Yeah, my reply was a bit tongue in cheek but the main gist is that Bavarian
and Standard German are not that far apart linguistically.

With a little bit of exposure you can understand it well enough.

But in Germany the dialects have a lower social status so you don't get lots
of opportunities to hear it as even those who speak dialect when at home or
with friends usually switch to something more closer to Standard German when
talking to obvious non-local people.

In Austria and Switzerland, this is completely different situation there and
you can expect to hear more dialect than you ever thought could possibly
exist.

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JoeAltmaier
In my experience Austrians and Swiss are dialect-deniers. They don't want to
admit that Austrian or Swiss are even German. "Some words in common" is the
most you'll get them to admit to.

~~~
bhaak
> In my experience Austrians and Swiss are dialect-deniers. They don't want to
> admit that Austrian or Swiss are even German.

With the last 200 years of history, "being German" and "speaking German" is no
longer interchangeable for native speakers, so I don't see an issue there. I'd
say that nowadays "being German" is only understood as "being a citizen of
Germany".

Of course, culturally Germans, Austrians and Swiss share a big common part.
It's quite often the case that people that are culturally close inflate the
small differences. To differentiate yourself from the big menacing neighbor or
to make yourself bigger than you actually are or whatever reasons.

> "Some words in common" is the most you'll get them to admit to.

I've seen both kinds of people. One claim that they speak "a dialect of
German" and the others speak "a completely different language that's only
slightly related to German".

But that's for discussions over a beer. Linguists usually don't bother with
such categorizations and just record and analyze what individuals actually
say, not what they claim the are saying.

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realusername
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).

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Mithaldu
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.)

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

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

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

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lkozma
Should read "more than 50 million people" for each language.

~~~
jordigh
Oh! Man, that sentence was difficult to parse that way. Thanks, I really tried
hard to make sense of that sentence.

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ommunist
The question is how polyglots are accounted in this graph?

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panglott
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.

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j_s
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.

~~~
jcranmer
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.

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phillc73
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
Yeah the numbers don't seem to be quite correct. According to Wikipedia there
are between 90 and 105 million native German speakers.

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rshaban
"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."

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veganjay
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

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jbandela1
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.

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raister
0.8% of France is speaking Portuguese? How?

~~~
Cirruz
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.

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abrowne
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=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=xE1hBBF37kwC&pg=PA511&lpg=PA511#v=onepage&q&f=false)
)

