8 years ago
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The World's Most Spoken Languages And Where They Are Spoken
This beautifully illustrated infographic (above), designed by South China Morning Post’s graphics director Alberto Lucas Lopéz, shows the most spoken known languages in the world and where they’re spoken by the 6.3 billion people included in the study.
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This map is just weirdly inconsistent. Chinese being listed as a macrolanguage seems okay with a little explanation (though it still makes me cringe to see Cantonese, Wu, and Mandarin under one big bubble--) but then why is Arabic not also listed as a macrolanguage with its respective varieties listed and given populations? Because no PRC government? And if we're going to go the route of depicting macrolanguages, why not depict the Romance languages together? --France, Italy and Spain have similar sovereignty as members of the EU as Hong Kong does in the PRC, you could even argue that they politically have less sovereignty than Taiwan. On top of that, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, and many others are as comparably mutually intelligible as the "dialects and languages" of a Chinese macrolanguage.
I also never particularly like it when these things just display native language by population. Sure it's technically correct but so what. China has such a huge population that it always dominates these infographics and doesn't really show the importance of the English language. Yes, more than a billion people speak Chinese but they are almost entirely in China. There is a reason almost everybody, including the Chinese, prioritises learning English. English is the real lingua franca.