19 June 2015
Language visualization created by Alberto Lucas Lopéz for the South China Morning Post
A neat visualization of the twenty-three most popular languages, depicted proportionally by the number of speakers.
The graphic was created by Alberto Lucas Lopéz for the South China Morning Post.
Data like this is always a bit suspect, but this chart is based on the information at Ethnologue.com, which is generally pretty good. The biggest problem is that it represents only the top twenty-three languages, leaving out the other six thousand or so. It also only captures L1, or first-language users. The total number of English speakers, for example, is much larger. It also fails to capture dialectal differences; for example Chinese is not as unified as the chart makes it out to be. Still, it’s a useful visualization in many ways.
For me, the most surprising thing in the image is the realization that French has relatively few speakers. There are some 87 million additional L2 speakers, but that’s still not a lot compared to the other languages on the chart. I would have guessed that it would have been much higher. Still, in the rankings of all world languages, French is in the top one percent.
