By Rick Noack and Lazaro Gamio April 23, 2015
These seven maps and charts, visualized by The Washington Post, will help you understand how diverse other parts of the world are in terms of languages.
1. Some continents have more languages than others
Not all continents are equally diverse in the number of spoken languages. Whereas Asia leads the statistics with 2,301 languages, Africa follows closely with 2,138.
There are about 1,300 languages in the Pacific, and 1,064 in South and North America. Europe, despite its many nation-states, is at the bottom of the pack with just 286.
2. These are some of the languages with the most native speakers
Chinese has more native speakers than any other language, followed by Hindi and Urdu, which have the same linguistic origins in northern India. English comes next with 527 million native speakers. Arabic is used by nearly 100 million more native speakers than Spanish.
The numbers are fascinating because they reflect the fact that two-thirds of the world’s population share only 12 native languages. Those numbers were recently published by the University of Düsseldorf’s Ulrich Ammon, who conducted a 15-year-long study.
His numbers are surprising, compared with the ones featured in the CIA’s Factbook. According to the CIA, Spanish is spoken by 4.85 percent of the world’s population and its use is even more widespread than English, which is spoken by 4.83 percent. However, the CIA numbers include only first native languages. Many people are bilingual, and whereas Spanish might be their first native language, English could be their second one. Ammon counts both first and second native language speakers.
The number for Portuguese is smaller than other sources suggest because not all Brazilians are native speakers. Some might also be surprised that Korean or Punjabi do not show up on the list: Indeed, both are nearly as widely spoken as Italian.
3. This map shows the countries with the most and least diversity of languages
As our visualization of Greenberg’s diversity index shows, the United States is not as linguistically diverse as many other nations.
If you randomly select two people in Cameroon, for instance, there is a 97 percent likelihood that they will have different mother tongues. In the United States, there is only a 33 percent likelihood that this is going to happen. You can click on the various countries shown in the map above to find out how the United States compares with other countries.
4. Many popular languages are spoken in more than just one country
The reason why English, French and Spanish are among the world’s most widespread languages has its roots in the imperial past of the nations where they originate.
Number of countries in which this language is spoken
5. English is widely used as an official language
However, whether a country has English as its official language says little about how its citizens really communicate with one another. In some of the nations highlighted above, only a tiny minority learned English as a native language.
6. Nevertheless, most languages are spoken only by a handful of people. That’s why about half of the world’s languages will disappear by the end of the century
About 3 percent of the world’s population accounts for 96 percent of all languages spoken today. Out of all languages in the world, 2,000 have fewer than 1,000 native speakers.
Hence, according to UNESCO estimates, which we visualized in the map above, about half of the world’s spoken languages will disappear by the end of the century. You can click on the map to enlarge it.
Linguistic extinction will hit some countries and regions harder than others. In the United States, endangered languages are primarily located along the West coast, as well as in reservations of indigenous people in the Midwest.
Globally,the Amazon rain forest, sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, Australia and Southeast Asia are about to lose the most languages.