10 million native Urdu speakers in Pakistan? there’s 11 million in Lahore alone and I’ve never met someone there who doesn’t speak Urdu
German language is missing Austria
The reason why English, French and Spanish are among the world’s most widespread languages has its roots in the imperial past of the nations where they originate
Must be a hot day in Hong Kong for them to be throwing shade like that. It’s true of course but it’s true for all of the biggest languages that conquest played a significant part in their dispersal. Chinese, Arabic, etc are left out of the statement for some reason.
What happened to the French speaking African countries?
Almost have as many people speak Tamil as Russian? Interesting!
There is something very wrong with the French part (so I’m assuming with the rest too)
- There are 321M native French speakers, not 75M
- Some of the countries cited are not countries but extra territorial French regions
Another weird consideration is that they total to 7B people. A lot of people have several native languages
Some of the missing are left out languages. E.g. there are ~200 million speakers of turkic languages, but they only cited Turkish with ~71 million. Amd they didn’t include a single Bantu language. There must be more than 300 million Bantu speakers.
It is also kind of weird that they give numbers to the tenth part while using wild estimates. Turkey has 85 million inhabitants and up to 10 million native speakers outside of turkey. There are no official ethnicity numbers from turkey as ethnicity is not registered. Also no one knows how many turkish speakers exactly live outside of turkey. But they give us numbers to the tenth part? The situation will be similar for the other languages.
Very well done!
Minor nitpick though, it’s “Telugu”, not “Telegu.”TIL Germany is in Eastern Europe
Aaaaaah “Chinese”.
A language family with many mutually unintelligible languages, large variantions in vocabulary and a script that us shared by all of them. And somehow we have to keep treating it as one language, so Winnie the Pooh isnt angry at us.
I’d like to point out that the dialect-language-family distinction is really a continuum. As dialects drift apart from each other, there is no point where God comes in and declares a dialect has graduated into its own language. Mutual intelligibility simply decreases continuously.
For instance, Portuguese and Spanish are widely considered to be different languages, although they are partially mutually intelligible, particularly in written form. Cantonese and Mandarin are less so, but still a bit. My uncle-in-law speaks Canto but can still understand my Mandarin (however, he can’t respond). I won’t deny that there is a political reason to want to refer to the Chinese/中文 languages as a single “language,” but the classification is honestly quite arbitrary. My understanding is that linguists generally place the category of “Chinese” somewhere between “language” and “family.”
Is Scots a different language than English? I don’t think I could understand someone speaking Scots without incredible concentration.
Yeah. It’s not like I can communicate with someone in Cantonese when they only know Mandarin.
If the same script is considered Chinese, might as well put Japanese Kanji inside.
I can’t even understand most Cantonese speakers when they’re speaking Mandarin…
Well I can’t even understand my Mandarin when I speak it
Why are Russia, Central Asia, Mongolia, and the Caucasus “Asia Major”, and East Asia and South Asia “Asia Minor”? I also think it’s weird they split Eastern and Western Europe since Germany and Bulgaria are the only countries I see from the region in the circle. Also Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan being in the “Middle East” seems weird to me.
Where do you see Bulgaria in the circle?
On the left side of Turkish
Ah, I was thinking of Bulgarian and wondering how it could fit in this graph.
TIL China is located in Asia Minor
I think those are old-timey terms that have been retired from academic and popular language. And anyway, Asia Minor means/meant Anatolia—basically modern-day Turkey.
Japanese only spoken in Indonesia?
That’s Javanese, as in the island Java.
Japanese is in the top-left.
Right, the gibberish they speak in Austria is not German. Oh wait…
No Nigeria for English? Lagos is the largest English speaking city in the world.
I don’t think this image accounts for second languages (otherwise Hindi would be twice as big), and as I understand it the reason that English is the official languae of Nigeria even as an independent country is so as not to give anyone’s first language priority over any other
I’ve met a handful of Nigerian students from different parts of the country and they all spoke English as a first language. Also, the US is on there, we don’t have an official language either.
I think you’ve misunderstood me a bit. English is the official language of Nigeria. One of the reasons it’s the official language was that it was seen as neutral within Nigeria because it wasn’t any group’s first language. Or it was at the time, anyway. That was an entire human lifetime ago now, so it’s quite possible that things have changed a bit since then.
Does every household in New Guinea speak a different language or wtf is going on there
