Languages of the World

If you share my love of these dynamic bar charts that display statistics as they change over time, you’ll love this one on the number of speakers of the world’s most common languages from 1900 – 2022.

English does very well here, which is largely due to America’s economic expansion post World War II, as well as the proliferation of scientific papers around the globe, and the need to standardize on one language in which all such matters are written and spoken.

This is very good news, when you think about it.  If religion (vs. science) were proliferating around the globe, perhaps it would be Arabic rather than English that had breakthrough numbers.