Show HN: I made a website that color-codes the world by language
languageworldmap.com
languageworldmap.com
Second, China speaks Mandarin and Cantonese (not available), and several regions have no overlap (script could be same between them). I can understand some Mandarin but Cantonese is alien. That is true for their own people too. Chinese don't speak 'Macau'. I am not even getting into India at this point. That's completely chaotic.
This kind of infographic in broad strokes can sometimes be hurtful to some of the people. Not that I have any strong opinions but OP should know this.
The site says "enter the languages you speak below to see with how many parts of the world you can communicate". Quite misleading.
Norway: 90%; Sweden: 90%; Denmark 86%.
This is higher than Canada and a number of Anglophone Caribbean islands. Admittedly Finland is lagging at 75%, but we can also consider Iceland at 98%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
I'd say maybe 50% are fluent, and that's heavily slanted toward the younger side of the population curve.
I'm confused by how this data is being generated. For example, India is tagged with Punjabi, but somehow not Bengali, even though the latter is the second most widely spoken language in India, with about three times as many speakers.
Ironically, Punjabi would be way more useful in Pakistan, where it's actually the most common first language, but Pakistan is tagged only with Urdu (and no other language).
I'm also skeptical of the "physical safety" tags; they seem inconsistent as well in a way that's difficult to reconcile.
Another thing this website miss out on is that, with goodwill on both parts, Scandinavians can usually communicate with other Scandinavians in different languages. I am Norwegian, and if I meet a Swede, we can just talk with each other. I can't talk Swedish fluently, but I can understand Swedish to such a degree that it's no problem to speak with a Swede who is speaking Swedish.
However, this relationship of understanding languages can be asymmetric, and it's not always as easy for a Swede to understand a Norwegian as it is for a Norwegian to understand a Swede.
Check out this video on asymmetric language understanding from NativLang for more about this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E042GHlUgoQ
The asymmetry exists, but ideas interchange easy enough because of common roots (except Finnish which sounds like Hungarian surprisingly).
All of the Scandinavians I spoke about had a wonderful pronunciation of English. They may have had an accent, but the English words were not distorted by their language, and not was the grammar.
On contrast, French often speak what I call a "lazy English". We tend to pronounce words as if they were in French and the structure of the sentence is very similar to French. This really looks like the Latin translations we did at school: translate the sentence word by word and stick the beth eat the end :)
It may be that the Scandinavian languages are more "compatible" with English (wildly guessing, with a lot of hand waving :))
In the Northern dialects and Scotland there are even more influences. For example in Scots dialect a kirk is a church, etc.
I’ve read that there are at least 900 English words that come from Danish and several hundred more that are suspected to be.[1]
Datter, arm, hus in Danish is daughter, arm and house in English, etc. it’s also why we have often two words with the same meaning (ie. anger and wrath or ill and sick).
[1]: http://www.englishproject.org/resources/english-language-and-danish-languageSeriously though, I bet finishing up this project felt great, then posting it to HackerNews was a huge dopamine rush, and now... everybody's just pointing out issues left and right because they accidentally stepped on a dozen landmines that are irrelevant in day-to-day life for 99% of us but entirely relevant when you post to an audience of millions.
For example, English would grt you very far in the Netherlands, but its not colored. Dutch can get you quite far in South Africa, but its not colored. English in particular should color most of the globe, except countries like Russia, France, and a few other blatant exceptions.
Can confirm, here it'll be problematic for one to speak in English with anyone younger than 16 / older than 40 and/or outside major population centers. (though in my experience, its the same situation with English in Austria and Russian in Latvia/Lithuania).
- it highlighted all of Spain, even though Catalan is only spoken in some areas
- it didn't highlight Andorra, an country where the only official language is Catalan
- it didn't highlight parts of France and Sardinia where Catalan is also spoken (albeit not officially or with limited recognition)
I happened to run into Viggo Mortensen's card, which claims he speaks 4 languages. He is slow, but I'd say his Catalan is pretty functional! https://www.ccma.cat/catradio/alacarta/el-mati-de-catalunya-...
For reference (Fr): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pays_catalans
1. the US isn't included for Spanish, despite the fact that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States. Over 41 million people aged five or older speak Spanish at home. Spanish is also the most learned language other than English, with about six million students. Estimates range from 41 million to over 50 million native speakers, heritage language speakers, and second-language speakers.
2. Esperanto which is quite possibly the language spoken in more countries than any other doesn't even exist. Sure with only around 2M speakers we're not the biggest language group, but we're probably the most internationally diverse.
3. the combination of these two makes me unclear on what you mean by "parts of the world you can communicate". Is this just a coloring of what countries legally recognize the language you entered? That's.... not really very useful or reflective of what the user of a site like this wants to know.
Are there places in the world where you'd start a sentence with "Pardonu, ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?" when you walk into a shop or ask for directions?
1. Languages don't always neatly map to country borders.
2. Linguistically diverse / multi-ethnic countries can have multiple official languages, and some of those official languages are spoken only in a geographical subset of the country.
3. Languages can be mutually intelligible. Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible and you can get by speaking Urdu in most parts of North India. The Balkan languages are largely mutually intelligible - correct me if I'm wrong.
Cute visualization, half-baked idea.
I'd like to go to Equatorial Guinea. It isn't heavily touristed and requires a visa. Nevertheless I searched it on YouTube and watched some videos and it sounds like an interesting place, and I liked the accent.
But this information is buried deep down in Google and Facebook and is sometimes outright illegal to disseminate (like in French vs Dutch at the level of Belgian municipalities).
Before Cambridge Analytica scandal Facebook business accounts had access to numbers down to a few thousand with regards to the interface language.
I remember that some 80% of Ukrainians used Russian as interface language in their Facebook, and in Brussels, Dutch was on par with English.
For most Ukrainians, Russian is (was?) a happy medium between being a language that they understand, and a language that is well supported in localizations.
I speak en-GB but I prefer an interface in en-US. Yet if you asked me to speak en-US with all its grammatical, lexical and phonological differences intact I would fail because my understanding is read-only.
Ukrainian vs Russian is a cultural choice. I sm sure that 80/20 ratio is old news by now, anyway.
> North America is more peaceful than the global average on the Safety and Security and Ongoing Conflict domains, but scores poorly on the Militarisation domain, particularly with regards to military expenditure, nuclear and heavy weapons, and weapons exports.
https://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/...
If anything, I want my travel destinations to have as big a military as possible. As a tourist I don't have to pay for any of the negative externalities of a large military, but would benefit from its protection.
- If it shows the language as spoken (=official language) in a country, a significant proportion of the population might still not speak it, e.g. French in Canada (native French speakers mostly in Quebec) or Russian in Estonia (not wanting to learn the language of the former occupying power).
- Even if a language is not an official language in a country, you might still get lucky, e.g. there are a lot of Hungarians in Romania, you can get pretty far with German in places frequented by German tourists, not to mention English.
Hell, even bird brains can speak Yolngu:
More real current estimate, is 10-40% in East Europe and in Baltic counties, 30% in Georgia and in some other exUSSR states in Asia, and less than 50% in Ukraine.
And I must say, even when few Asia countries claimed to be "USSR Republics", in reality, there survived old Asian totalitarianism of old tribes and they was soviet just for tourists, but for citizens, Asian traditions remain almost unchanged until collapse of USSR.
I say this because there's clearly lots of interest (engagement: 78 comments) but people aren't happy with the results (only 37 points).
The first language I typed in was English and right away I could tell it didn't take into account the inroads English has made as a second language. All of Europe (sans UK) is completely blank, for example.
I still bookmarked the site because I'm hopeful that the results will become more accurate over time as the constructive criticisms are addressed.
I'm from the US and I've traveled to ~10 countries which I didn't speak the native language.
In some countries the locals are able to communicate in English/Spanish, and in others, not so much. What would be interesting to see is what % (or an estimate) of the locals can communicate in one of the languages you know (that's probably a hard problem to solve and not sure if the data is readily available) vs whether it's the official language.
Also, it would be interesting to see partial overlap cases (e.g. Ukrainian-Belarussian, Russian-Serbian) where one party could understand another but couldn't answer well except in "universal" sign language (or through switching to another common denominator language); though good luck with researching this one.
Obviously this whole comment section is focusing on the problem of defining spoken language, but you have created a great proof of concept of an interesting idea. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves.
I mean, duh, Kim Kardashian does speak English.
It's so much more nuanced than this. I spent much time in Turkey and met people from Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and other Central Asian countries. All the Turkic languages are all mutually intelligible.
In Florida, I came across spanish speaking people who did not know English. That experience was surreal.
For example, Sindhi is a language spoken in just one province. Punjabi is a language native to two provinces in two countries.
It has nothing to do with physical safety, obviously.
And most people speak Engnlish.
Also, it gives you a sense of history - as the languages that countries speak are influenced by past colonization.
> Pirahã is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers.
Perhaps it’s there on the map, but we don’t see it, because the dot is so small and hard to find.
I know 3 foreign languages and I think it's a waste of time to learn more, because if a person is not literate enough to communicate in English, I have nothing to talk to them about.
I agree, I have the same with quantum physics and Middle-Age French.