Alberto Lucas Lopéz
There are 7 billion people on earth and about 7000 languages , but more than half of the world ’s population speaks one of just 23 languages . This infographic , created byAlberto Lucas Lopézfor theSouth China Morning Post , shows the relative size of speaker universe for all the speech that have over 50 million speakers ( based on data fromEthnologue ) . It shows , quite strikingly , how giant the population of Chinese speakers is , equate to any of the other languages .
On close inspection ofthe full resolution map , you’re able to see that even when give way down by idiom , Chinese is massive . At 848 million loudspeaker , Mandarin outstrips English by half a billion . " Smaller " dialects like Wu and Cantonese outstrip the entire population of Persian and Malay verbalizer .
The image is further broken down by area . The pocket-sized areas within each language show the issue of verbaliser in dissimilar countries . Although the countries for each language are not comprehensive — countries with modest numbers of speakers of that language are aggroup together under a single country mark with " + " — the number of smaller area gives a good delineation of nationality and language at a glimpse . Arabic is spoken in a large number of countries , while Japanese is only speak in Japan . Nearly half of Bengali speakers endure in India .
The people of color show which regions the countries are in using the next coding :
The food colour shows that linguistic process like Spanish and English have wider geographic distribution than other large languages . With the exception of French , colonial languages like Spanish , English , and Portuguese have many more speakers in the new earth than they have in their land of origin .
Take a closer spirit at the map and see additional selective information at thefull size version .
