There are over 7,100 known languages actively spoken in the world today. Of those, just twenty-three of them act as a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. Collectively, those 23 languages make up the native tongue of more than half the world (4.1 billion people).
This infographic represent each language within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country. The coloring shows how the languages have taken root in many different regions.
via Alberto Lucas López .
As you can see, Chinese is by far the most dominant language on the planet right now, with almost 1.2 billion people speaking dialects. Comparatively, pretty much every other language on Earth is an also-ran: Spanish (399 million speakers), English (335 million), Hindi (260 million), and Arabic (242 million) take up the next four positions. Only when you add them up do they come close to the reach Chinese has.
Although Chinese is the most popular language on Earth, it's worth noting that its influence wanes greatly outside of Asia.
If you take the geographic diversity of where a language is spoken into account, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese are the most influential languages on Earth, because of colonialism.
For more, here is a link to the Washington Post's article: The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts.
How Big Is America? So Big!
Sometimes it helps to employ unconventional perspectives when thinking about the size of things.
Here's a map that shows how massive and productive America's $16.7 trillion economy is on a global scale.
The map compares the gross domestic product of each US states with the national GDPs of other nations.
America's largest state economy is California. For 2013, the Golden State's GDP was about $2.05 trillion, roughly the same as Brazil's GDP ($2.25 trillion). But Brazil's population is about 200.4 million, while California's is just 38.8 million — meaning California produces about the same as Brazil with about 80% fewer people.
To put it in a global perspective, if California were its own country in 2013, it would have been the 10th-biggest economy in the world, close behind Russia, whose GDP was $2.096 trillion that year.
Check out the rest of the states in the map below:
via Business Insider.
Based on population, the US is the third-largest country in the world.
To put that in perspective, below is a a map that renames each state with the country that has the closest population to it.
via Business Insider.
The map, below, is interesting in a different way. I'm sure you've heard that "a picture is worth a thousand words." Here, a couple dozen words capture the world.
by Michael Tompsett via Fine Art America.
Posted at 06:56 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Ideas, Market Commentary, Science, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)
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