Another nice infographic, breaking down the world's languages in various ways. Very cool.
A World of Languages
There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 2…
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If one were to group together the remaining Romance languages and consider them together as a "metalanguage" group as they've designated Chinese, you come up with a fairly impressive number of speakers under vestigial Empire influence:
French 75.9
Spanish 399
Portuguese 203
Italian 63.8
Total: 741.7
+The Bruce, Mile High I'm not nearly enough of a Chinese scholar to know how to compare those two "metalanguage" groupings.
(If you bundle up all the Germanic languages, you get about 150 million — unless you then drag in English, in which case it climbs to 500-odd million.)
+Dave Hill, sorry, the term they use is "macrolanguage" (should have blown it up more before). They define it as "includes different languages and dialects" which one could argue applies similarly to at least the Romance languages and perhaps, as you point out, the Germanic languages as well (though I'd be hesitant to include English in the Germanic languages group despite its heritage — the French influence from the occupations introducing so much latinate influence as to make it a different beast).
+The Bruce, Mile High And Arabic is included as one, although (as I understand it) only the writing is common across the Arabic world (Middle East and N Africa), while the spoken language is significantly different.
Agreed on English and Germanic — it's generally classified that way, but the massive contamination / mutation after the Normans (with a healthy soupcon from everyone else under the sun) makes it its own beast. That why I broke out the totals.
სად არის ქართული? Actually, that answer is self evident, but I do find languages that have no common root ancestor to be more interesting that wanting to figure out where we should splice languages apart on a graph.
+William Altman I think both are interesting, but I agree that uniquely rooted languages are their own brand of fun.
In this case, the graphic is about larger languages and how and where they are. Unique languages like Georgian (and, I suspect, Finnish and Basque) aren't in its purvue, but fall into the wider circle, as do various aboriginal American languages, etc.