Converting that top 10 from the first pictures into percentages of the world population:
- 1996: 2.6/5.8 = 45%
- 2025: 3.1/8.2 = 38%
This decrease from 45% to 38% is actually good news, in my opinion. It means higher language diversity.
For the second picture, the interesting part is to contrast it with the first one:
- the L1 English speaking community is less than a half the L1 Mandarin one, but the former has a considerably larger non-native speaking community
- Hindi 345m vs. 609m might look like a surprise, but it’s actually understandable, given the linguistic landscape of India. I expect most L2+ Hindi speakers to speak natively another language from India, too.
Picture #3 is interesting for potential diversity hotspots, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Deciding what counts as a separated language is surprisingly hard; specially when language continua are involved. Also, it’s understandably biased towards countries that control larger populations.
What would be a better measure for picture three? Language Per Capita? Languages Spoken By At Least X% Of The Population?
I think languages per capita (or “languages per 10 000 inhabitants”) would be already better, and a low-hanging fruit.
A more invested option would be to disregard countries, split the world into ~200 geographical areas with ~40M inhabitants each, and then count the languages in each of those areas. This would be specially useful because, in large countries, most of the linguistic diversity is clustered into a few regions.
That’s a much better proposal actually. Would also make especially good sense for regions of Africa, where country lines have very little to do with the distribution of languages for the most part.
What’s with the drop in German L1 speakers? If I’m understanding the first image correctly, the number went from 98m to less than 86m
