I’m not going to start a battle by talking about what language is and what dialect is. There is a register of almost 8,000 languages in the world and every few minutes one of them disappears. There are more than 2,000 in danger. Actually, An estimated 96% is spoken by just 3% of the world’s population.. What does this mean? Hegemony.
Just take a look at the graphic that serves as the cover of the article. Prepared for the South China Morning Post in 2015, this visual map shows the small immensity of the world’s most spoken languages. And how much, less than 20, rules over the rest. This could be considered good news: in a more plural Babel, clear understanding is more difficult. But each time a language is lost, we lose with it an enormous cultural wealth, its nuances and its linguistic genealogy.
The Visual Capitalist chart gives two clues: English is the most spoken language in the entire digital world, but In the analogue world, the weight of Chinese over the group of global speakers is unavoidable.. And pay close attention to Spanish and Hindu. Ironically, one of those showing the fastest growth is none other than the French, at the bottom of this circumference. Because? Because it is the mother tongue of many African colonies where indigenous languages have been buried in favor of a language which opens the doors to a modern Europe.
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The most spoken languages in the world
On the other hand, we must take into account the scale of other minor languages although they are spoken in territories much smaller than Central Africa. In India, Hindi is just one example of plurality: Tamil is spoken by more than 68 million speakers, Telugu by more than 74 million, and Marathi by a further 71 million. Vietnamese is not far behind either and Bengali is spoken by 82 million people in India and 100 million in Bangladesh.
The Visual Capitalist team has also configured this other map which you can see on the left, and which can be summarized in the following classification:
- English: With 1.5 billion speakers, its grammatical simplicity and its use as a neutral language have made it the “official” language of business and academia. In fact, it is the international means of communication, whether you are in a restaurant, an airport or a hotel.
- Mandarin Chinese: With 1.1 billion speakers, it is the dominant language in China and mastering it requires knowledge of thousands of characters. A difficulty which is not uncommon is the encouragement sought by European students who are not content with German or Russian.
- Hindi: Spoken by 610 million people, comes from Sanskrit and has influence from multiple languages, connecting the majority of India’s population.
- Spanish: With 560 million speakers, it spread through colonization and remains a second language in much of the United States thanks to Latino immigrants.
- French: With 310 million speakers, French mixes Latin and Celtic languages and is recognized for its complex historical evolution. But as we said, its strategic strength lies in the African colonies.
- Standard Arabic: with 274 million speakers, its expansion has been worldwide, notably thanks to the Koran, with varied dialects but retaining its classic form.
- Bengali: More than 273 million people speak it, it is the language of Bangladesh and the second largest in India, and is characterized by its neutral gender and large vocabulary.
- Russian: with 255 million speakers, it loses its validity despite the connection of a vast region. The Cyrillic alphabet, based on Greek, seems to put off new students.
- Portuguese: We should not ignore our neighbors, who with 264 million speakers, to which we must add their Brazilian “version”, continue to grow.
- Urdu: another heavyweight with more than 232 million speakers. It is the official language of Pakistan, influenced by Persian and Arabic, and is valued for its grammatical sophistication, similar to that of Spanish.
And finally, that of Indonesia stands out with almost 200 million and that of Germany with 133 million. Below, 6,800 other languages and as many dialects. By the way, both charts were created with the Voronoi application, from Visual Capitalist. This application is completely free and allows you to create different visual trees, color cards and has very functional tools to represent ideas. It is also available for Android and allows you to be part of a community where you can view, save and edit other users’ creations.
Scope | Voronoi for SCMP
Map of the first 37 languages | PiMaster3 for Wikimedia
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