I always love reading fact filled infographics. I find the stats, maps, and charts to be immensely useful and this one will go down on my all time favorites list! Some of the info was surprising, some not so much.
For example, I knew that Mandarin Chinese was the most widely spoken language, but figured English would come in at number two. I was wrong! Hindi takes second place, while Spanish takes third. English comes in at Fourth place, followed by Arabic (another surprise).
And in Papua New Guinea, more than 800 languages are spoken. Let me repeat that, more than 800 languages! That’s mind blowing, especially given that Papua New Guinea is not a big country like China or India! In Indonesia, there are nearly 750 spoken languages but that makes sense given that there are about 250 million people living in the country.
Many languages have gone extinct, and since many other languages are spoken by a 1000 or less native speakers, this list is likely to grow.
In fact,
94 percent of all languages are regularly spoken by just 6 % of the world’s population.
If you’re looking to learn a language real quickly, you can check out Taki Taki, it has only 340 spoken words! Meanwhile, Rotokas features only 12 letters in its alphabet and Khmer is the largest with 74 different letters!
Turns out that plain old English has some interesting facts too. For one, it’s the most widely spoken second language. Two, with over 250,000 words, it features the biggest vocabulary of any language.
I won’t hog all the facts, so you should check out this extremely insightful infographic by Zfort Group!
