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.
There's just no unambiguous way to distinguish various dialects, sociolects, and other linguistics varieties into discrete "languages" easily.
"Mutual intelligibility" is also problematic. In a highly multilingual community, people may have a high passive knowledge of another clearly distinct language that they can understand each other fine when speaking distinct languages/varieties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yours is a good comment on the unreliability of Ethnologue for these kinds of language comparisons. I'll jump in here with a response to one part of your comment near the end.
All Chinese speakers read the same script even if their spoken language is quite different.
That's an oversimplification. Chinese speakers who have not learned to read of course don't read any script. And in actual current usage, written Chinese is conformed to the speech patterns of the national standard language, Mandarin, and reflects the vocabulary and grammatical patterns of that language. Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.
I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
Many other examples of words, phrases, and whole sentences that are essentially unreadable to persons who have learned only Modern Standard Chinese can be found in texts produced in Chinese characters by speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects"). Similar considerations apply to Japanese, which is not even a language cognate with Chinese, and also links Chinese characters to particular speech morphemes (whether etymologically Japanese or Sino-Japanese) rather than with abstract concepts.
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).
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.)
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.
Interestingly.
Cantonese and Mandarin share the same scripting, though spoken quite differently. As a Chinese who doesn't speak Cantonese, I never found it difficult in reading the shop names in HK/Canton.
well, it seems that Hindi and Urdu is just the opposite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you know Spanish, you will understand written Portuguese and Italian quite well, so you get those as a free bonus.
On the other hand, Chinese with Mandarin and it's many dialects (Cantonese, Shanghainese etc..) is a whole new game.. with a bonus that they all use the same written language.
"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."
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
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.
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.
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.