4 ms·
So it's not the first time this chart is actually posted on HN but actually almost everything is wrong on it. German does not include Austria, French does not i
by realusername 11y ago
So it's not the first time this chart is actually posted on HN but actually almost everything is wrong on it. German does not include Austria, French does not include African countries, Chinese should be splitted, English and Russian numbers are way too low (I suspect at least half of the population of Ukraine speaks Russian). And there is I'm sure lots of other mistakes.
- glup 11y agoThe premise of a countable number of languages should tip off the reader that this is mostly for entertainment value; Africa appears to be entirely missing (bad data source?). I like the visualization though, in that it relates nation-states to linguistic identity. It shows a generally strong correspondence between these two variables, with some outliers, generally related to colonial history: people in India speak many languages; Spanish is spoken by people in many nations.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoBut that correspondence is artificial. For example, the Latin languages are more similar than the Chinese dialects. The main reason why Spanish is a language and Mandarin is a dialect is political.
- taneliv 11y agoI thought Austria was the grey spot at the lower right hand corner? Seems a bit small for 8+ million people, though, maybe 3 million in my eyes. It also says "first language speakers" in the overview circle towards upper left hand corner of the whole infographic, so maybe that's what they counted, not native or fluent speakers. That could perhaps explain the perceived low number of Ukrainian speakers of Russian?