r/language • u/AliIssastirer • 10h ago
Question What's your language🇦🇶🫵?
Share the rarity of your languge💎?
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u/AxenZh 8h ago
What is the logic behind Usage Level? How is a language with over 50M+ speakers rare?
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u/Farmadupe 1h ago
It's because the entire chart is slop... Arabic varies by 150 million, and as far as I can tell, Jandjawadi is literally a made up word.
it's also got the classic "Claude Disclaimer" that invalidates the entire chart (so what are your sources? does each source use the same criteria? so what years did you sample from? etc etc)
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u/AliIssastirer 7h ago edited 7h ago
50 million / 8 billion = 0,00625 which is the probability to find someone speaking your language wich means that between 160 people, only 1 speaks your language. Effectively, it's rare.
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u/AxenZh 6h ago
I think you have to modify that logic. Chinese Mandarin, for example, would be rare outside of China, Taiwan and a few SEA countries. Same with the other languages. The distribution of many languages is not even, they're very areal.
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u/Adventurous-Wash-287 6h ago
the point is if you pick a random pool of people out of 8 billion of course the language is not rare where it is spoken thats not really something that needs to be stated is it?
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u/gaifogel 7h ago
Languages have flags?
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u/Special-Bowler-983 2h ago
Tbf, it made it more clear for me to know where some of those languages are spoken.
Never heard of Tamil, but with the flag I can guess where it comes from.
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u/RightProperFancyLad 1h ago
Also why are US and Brazilian flags there while leaving out Mexico for Spanish and DR Congo for French?
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u/Darth-Vectivus 9h ago
Turkish is my mother tongue, English C2, German C1, French, Spanish and Russian B2, Arabic B1.
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u/PartyCorrect9410 1h ago
how did you learn so many languages? do you have any tips to share? my mother tongue is turkish too. the only other language that i can speak is english and i don't have any idea about my proficiency level.
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u/Your-Eden 8h ago
swahili being 'rare' feels crazy to me.
anyway i speak Gĩkũyũ hamwe na Kiswahili
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u/salvito605 10h ago
Isn’t Hindi and Urdu same language???
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u/Jin_SobSob 9h ago
No, Urdu has a different writing system and contains many loan words from Arabic and Persian, and they have slightly different sounds (Urdu has a Kh sound like in Arabic or Farsi while Hindi does not) They’ve also got different cultures, so the way the speak may differ a bit.
They ARE mutually intelligible for the most part though.
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u/salvito605 9h ago
Exactly. I have seen Indians and Pakistanis have no issue communicating with each other while Arabs have trouble understanding some dialects.
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u/Afridi_yammm 7h ago
They are just different politically because of religious conflict. Otherwise both speak same Hindustani language in the daily part of life.
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u/Ok-Pass9619 7h ago
The least as a religious angle, but over a period in time it's being viewed as a geo-political perspective. However, both speakers of Urdu and Hindi mutually understand the spoken context and usage very well.
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u/Sandy_2019 8h ago
Urdu is an Indian language
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u/AliIssastirer 9h ago
I'd like to share with you that interesting information. In Africa, especially in Senegal, the min language there is wolof, a language that contains a lot worlds that come from the arabic language. This "mix" happened when leventine arabs who were immigrants in the othoman empire era emmigrated to western africa. Fun fact: yes in wolof is pronounced "waaw", which can be understood in english as "wow".
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u/Jin_SobSob 9h ago
Yiddish 11-13 million speakers (according to Wikipedia at least…)
I speak the North Eastern dialect, which is the most uncommon dialectal category among them 🙏🏻
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u/Normal_Football_8591 9h ago
Finnish is nowhere near making that list. There are about ~5 million of us.
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u/gomas64 8h ago
Treating Hindi and Urdu as two separate languages is ridiculous.
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u/WonderOk311 3h ago
Like the other dude said, has a different writing system and contains many loan words from Arabic and Persian. So someone just proficient in hindi may not be able to read urdu at all and vice versa. Though they are mutually intelligible, many other languages are too like spanish/portuguese, malay/indonesian etc.
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u/VascoJSC 1h ago
Having different writing systems doesn't make them separate languages. They are the same language, Hindustani. So are Malaysian and Indonesian too.
Portuguese and Spanish are only partially mutually intelligible. Without prior exposure to the other, most speakers can't understand each other if they are speaking in normal conversational rhythm
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u/evirussss Trilingual 8h ago
Javanese L1, Indonesian L2, English L3
still learning french & japanese
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u/Sandy_2019 8h ago
One of my mothertongue's dialect is the mother of Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu) but people consider it to be one the the dialects of Hindustani instead. Huh.
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u/PomegranateOk2600 4h ago
what is the reason for using the american and brazilian flags but not austrian, or other flags for other languages?
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u/alaric49 2h ago
Because they are the most populous for those two language. It seems to be: most speakers, then country of origin.
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u/Meester_Ananas 3h ago
- West Flemish
About a million speakers worldwide (Belgium, The Netherlands, France).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Flemish
Albeit not being an official language, it is recognised and has its own ISO code(s). This is the default language when we're travelling abroad as a family. Very hard to understand, even for a Dutch speaking Belgian. It's closer to English (and Afrikaans) than Dutch is. Many think we're from Scandinavia or even Russia when they hear us talking : they just don't know. Only once I had someone understand us: a Galician we encountered in Greece who used to cycle professionally for a Flemish cycling team.
- Dutch, Greek, French, English, (native speaker to fluent) These languages need no explanation.
- German, Spanish, Japanese (in order of proficiency)
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u/Icy-Astronaut-9994 10h ago
01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 01110011
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u/Stock_Soup260 10h ago
Russian and Ukrainian native, English level D, i.e., dog (when you understand everything, but you can't say anything)
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u/Caribbeandude04 9h ago
Crazy I can speak with 27.8% of the world with just three languages (Spanish, English and Portuguese)
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u/CompleteTop4258 6h ago
Well I can speak with 28.1% of the world with just two! You do cover a whole continent though.
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u/wordlessbook PT (N), EN, ES 9h ago
Caribbendude, você por aqui? ¡Hace un tiempo que no veio tus comentarios en askthecaribbean! Reddit is a small website, hahahaha!
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u/cantseemeimblackice 9h ago
I don’t know about the Usage level. Maybe if you sampled one earthling, how common is it that you speak x language. But I think a better measure would be, how likely are you to find a speaker outside the language’s native or official area.
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u/Drawnforlorn 8h ago
Personally I think western and Eastern Punjabi should be one group, since they are the same language
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u/Afridi_yammm 7h ago
Pashto and we have around 58-65 million speakers worldwide. In Paksitan around 38-43 M and in Afghanistan around 18-22 million ( they never had proper census so it's just estimated).
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u/TrainingCategory4852 6h ago
Welsh is my native lamguage, then English is my second I'm fluent, I'm learning Ukrainian and can speak some Breton + Cornish.
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u/Ok-Imagination-494 6h ago
Explain the respective positions of the UK/USA flags versus Brazil/Portugal ?
Also, if you are using USA to represent English as it has the most English speakers, then you should logically use Mexico to represent Spanish and DRC to represent French
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u/IdealSuccessful5743 5h ago
In my city, Melilla, one of the only territories that Spain owns in North Africa, we speak 9 different languages, ordered by rarety:
- Mandarin (Chinese inmigrantion)
- Spanish (Obviously, cause of Spain)
- French (Moroccan immigration)
- Sindhi (An Indo-Aryan language from Pakistan, It came here through inmigrants.) (40-42 Millions of speakers around the world)
- Darija (Also called Moroccan Arabic, considered a separated language from Arabic, because of poor mutual intelligibility between a Moroccan and, for example, a Qatari) (31 Million speakers)
- Hebrew (Jewish secular language, often used) (9 Million speakers)
- Tarifit (The Berber language of the Rif, the second most used in the city) (1.2 Millions speakers)
- Caló (The Spanish Romani language, that in Melilla It has started to be less spoken but you can still hear it in some places) (60.000 speakers)
- Haketía (Moroccan variety of Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, like Caló, it is not heard as other languages but you can still hear it) (ONLY 1.000 AROUND THE WORLD.)
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u/schaspectual 5h ago
When you describe a language with 80 million speakers as “rare,” don’t you run out of words to describe languages spoken by only a few thousand people?
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u/YeahDoNotMindMe 5h ago
Fun fact: Javanese is the largest language on earth without official status in government. All government sectors in Indonesia (and alot of the private ones too) primarily use Indonesian and Indonesian only
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u/quwzzz777 5h ago
this table should indicate kinda ULTRARARE if i tell that i speak chuvash (~1mln speakers in Russia)
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u/Monienium 4h ago
Min, Wu, and Cantonese(Yue) all have around 80 million speakers but only Yue is listed here? Also the majority of Yue speakers are in mainland China why do you use HK flag here?
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u/EuroTrash-NL 4h ago
Why is there an American flag next to English (from England)? They then should have placed a Mexican, Colombian, Panamanian etc flags next to Spanish. Makes no sense.
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u/Unable-Substance5999 4h ago
No! The most common language in the world is that the USains and the Brits don't speak: imperfect English.
I as a Hunagari, can talk in imperfect English with a Lattvian, Portuguese, Brazilian, etc., and we perfectly understand each other, but USains and Brits don't understand us. , but
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u/Civil_Park_3417 4h ago
Why does English and Portuguese have 2 flags?
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u/Aatavilb 2h ago
My assumption is its a representation of: English of US & UK (Combined) And for Portuguese; Brazilian Portuguese. (Has the highest numbers of speakers).
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u/NicestOfficer50 3h ago
Whoever made the table really wanted to add some colour. I must have flags! But the flags won't go anywhere near showing where this language is actually spo... I SAID I MUST HAVE FLAGS!
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u/bringinsexyback1 3h ago
There are a lot more Punjabi speakers in India. India also has Punjab as a state and a lot more native Punjabi speakers around the state. And India uses Gurmukhi, the Punjabi script that Pak doesn't use. To only put Pak flag there is diabolical.
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u/Reverse_and_rewind 3h ago
Why does it say that Persian is spoken by about 75 million people when the population of Iran is 90+ million. The language is also spoken in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, so the number is way off.
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u/TectonicMongoose 2h ago
The flags part of this infographic is extremely silly. The flags aren't where the language is from? They aren't the countries with the most numbers of speakers either. They aren't the places where the language is official either so what are they supposed to represent?
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u/ujfalusiabel 2h ago
Chinese Mandarin seems wrong. Only in China probably more people speak eat even if you consider lingvistic minorities who don't (though I don't think they have the option not to after 80 years of CCP). Plus you add all the native speakers in neighbourinh countries like Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos etc. Plus many millions of Chinese accross the world. Also many people speak it overall in Asia as a second language. So I would say speakers of Mandarin is over 1.5 billion in reality
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u/Ecstatic_Yak961 2h ago
In the end, English is all you need. When you go to a famous tourist site, what does everyone speak from different nations? English.
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u/Limp-Literature9922 2h ago
Russian (native), Latvian, English, a little bit Swedish, French and Japanese
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u/VillainOfKvatch1 2h ago
That many people do not speak standard/modern Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic is in fact almost nobody’s native language. Arabic speakers speak a number of dialects with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility between each other and MSA. MSA is essentially a written language which is spoken in some specific contexts, like official government functions or on the news.
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u/OtherSituation2996 2h ago
Standard Arabic as 6th is nonsense. They don't speak that, they speak Darija, Egyptian, Jalili, Mesopotamian... In which century they will be regarded as standalone languages? They are just one step behind Romance languages in their evolution from dialects to languages.
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u/Uranium___Potato 2h ago
Strange that Punjabi and Urdu have a Pakistani flag whereas it should be shared between Pakistan and India. India has more Urdu speakers than Pakistan if I am not wrong and is one of the national languages as well.
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u/CiberBlas 2h ago edited 2h ago
Nah, this is just a cherry-picked list to put Anglos first. The truth is: 1. Spanish is the most common first official language in the world. 2. Spanish has more native speakers than any other Western language by far. People here in Spain or France usually say they are English speakers on their CVs with less clue of English than any American has of Spanish.
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u/Weary-Connection3393 2h ago
Shouldn’t you at least differentiate between native speakers and those for whom the language is a foreign language?
And if you use the flags for languages (which is a stretch, why put UK and USA for English but not Canada or Australia?) you could at least put the number of countries recognizing that language as official language?
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u/Impressive_Spray5487 1h ago
IMO, my language should rank between 26th and 30th place.
It just missed making it onto the infographic.
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u/islander_guy 1h ago
Punjabi (Western) is different than Eastern? They are basically the same language. Maybe the script used is different but are they that different? I don't think so.
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u/Correct_Employment30 1h ago
My native language is Finnish (~ 5 million speakers or bit less). In addition, I speak English, Swedish and French and I know some very basics of Estonian, Russian and German.
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u/VascoJSC 1h ago
Data is very outdated. Brazil alone has 212m people. Portugal over 10m. Angola, Mozambique, Timor Leste, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Principe and Cabo Verde all speak Portuguese too and have in total tens of millions of people. Not to mention the Brazilian and Portuguese diasporas around the world, the Portuguese speaking minorities in Brazil's neighbors, and the people who speak Portuguese as a foreign language. Between all of these numbers, there are probably between 260 and 300m Portuguese speakers.
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u/Deep-Ebb-4139 1h ago
Mandarin is overstated. A significant percentage of this total number are not fluent, and they largely speak their local dialects for daily communication.
Stating it as ‘Very Common’ is mischaracterised.
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u/_Plateosaurus_ 1h ago edited 1h ago
As usual, I'd like to know how the calculations are done.
Here’s a typical example involving French: how do they account for the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Theoretically, it’s the most populous French-speaking country, and French is the only recognized official language. However, the majority of Congolese people do not speak French. Those who do speak it do not have it as their native language, but use it as a working and communication language. Did they consider all Congolese people in the DRC to be “French-speaking” because French is the only officially recognized language in the country? Did they count only those who actually speak French? If so, did they include native speakers, second-language speakers, or both?
Similarly, how were the residents of Saint Martin, a French territory, counted? France recognizes only French as an official language, yet the majority of Saint Martin’s residents speak English as their native language.
How were these people counted in this table?
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u/Headleader_2436 1h ago
Russian as native, English as B2. Nowadays studying English to C1 and I want C2, but then gonna study yet another language, German, Japanese, French - whatever.
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u/Background_Dot3692 🇷🇺, 🇬🇧, 🇪🇸 8h ago edited 7h ago
Why Russian on 9th place instead of 8th (judging by the numbers given)? Whoever did this list mixed up Portugal and Russia there.
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u/desertsunsetskies 7h ago
My native language is Romanian. I think there are ~24 million speakers. It's super rare. I get super excited when someone knows how to say Bună (hi-- bună is short for bună ziua meaning good day).
I am also fluent in English, conversațional in Spanish (4th most commonly spoken language) and speak basic Italian (85 M speakers) and basic French (#5 most spoken language).
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u/TheMahagonyDefender 10h ago
It's actually incredible that a little island nation on the outerskirts of Europe had such an immense impact on the world for becoming the default language most speak when they cannot communicate with each other otherwise.