Today’s infographic condenses the 7,102 known living languages today into a visualization, with individual colors representing each world region.
Only 23 languages are spoken by at least 50 million people. What’s more, over half the planet speaks at least one of these 23 languages as their mother tongue.
Chinese dominates as a macrolanguage, but it’s important to note that it consists of numerous languages. Mandarin, Yue (including Cantonese), Min, Wu, and Hakka cover over 200 individual dialects, which vary further by geographic location.
Country Native Chinese speakers (millions) Total 1,197 million
| China | 1,152.0 |
| Taiwan | 21.8 |
| Hong Kong | 6.5 |
| Malaysia | 5.1 |
| Singapore | 1.8 |
| Thailand | 1.2 |
| Vietnam | 0.9 |
| Philippines | 0.7 |
| Myanmar | 0.5 |
| Macau | 0.5 |
| Other | 6.0 |
Chinese is one of the most challenging languages for English speakers to pick up, in part due its completely unfamiliar scripts. You’d have to know at least 3,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper, a far cry from memorizing the A-Z alphabet.
Source: http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages
