A proportional visualization of the world's most popular languages

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.

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.

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.

The question is how polyglots are accounted in this graph?

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.

Is that unnamed dot in "German" meant to represent Austria? It is currently unlabeled, so just guessing.

Australia's population is also around 22million, not 15 million. I struggle to believe there are 7 million non-English speakers in Auatralia.

"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.

0.8% of France is speaking Portuguese? How?