FYI: The world's languages, in 7 maps and charts

Mark Davis ☕️ mark at macchiato.com
Wed May 27 14:10:53 CDT 2015


I think it is gives a misleading picture to only include mother-language
speakers, rather than all languages (at a reasonable level of fluency).
Every Swiss German is fluent in High German.

Part of the problem is that it is very hard to get good data on the
multiple languages that people speak—a huge number of people are fluent in
more than one—and on the level of fluency in each. That alone makes it
difficult to do accurate representations. That level of accuracy may not be
necessary to get a general picture, but when the map purports to go into
great detail...


Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis>

*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 4:59 PM, Denis Jacquerye <moyogo at gmail.com> wrote:

> The data used to build the infographic comes from Ethnologue.com.
> http://www.ethnologue.com/language/deu does not indicate the Standard
> German L1 population in Austria and gives a population of 727 000 Standard
> German L1 speakers in Switzerland (the difference is counted as Swiss
> German L1 speakers).
>
> On Wed, 27 May 2015 at 11:22 Mark Davis [image: ☕]️ <mark at macchiato.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hmmm. How accurate can it be? They forgot Austria, and got Switzerland
>> wrong by almost a power of 10.
>>
>>
>> Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis>
>>
>> *— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*
>>
>> On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 10:18 AM, Denis Jacquerye <moyogo at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The South China Morning Post published a similar infographic:
>>> A world of languages - and how many speak them
>>>
>>> http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages
>>>
>>
>>
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