These kinds of popsci graphs are quite misleading. Unlike with the “Spanish”* bubble, the “Chinese” and “Arabic” bubbles contain many mutually unintelligible languages. Though to be fair, many (most?) of the people in the “Arabic” bubble can speak/read Modern Standard Arabic as a lingua franca, and virtually everyone in China can read Standard Chinese.
*Also, Dude, Spanish is not the preferred nomenclature. Castilian, please.
You seem like somebody who might have an answer for me:
A streaming service that I'm using lists the spoken language of the show, and I've often seen Spanish, Espanol, and Castilian listed. What's the difference between Espanol and Castilian - is it like a regional dialect? Also I'm probably misinformed, but I always thought that Espanol was the English word for Spanish, which makes it seem odd that the service would list both Espanol and Spanish separately.
* Walter, this isn't a guy who wrote the Magna Carta, this is a guy...
If there are two Spanishish audio tracks, I think that pretty much always means that one is “Latin American” and the other is “Peninsular.” I haven’t investigated this myself, but I hear that the “Latin American” track is predominantly a white collar Central Mexican accent. The standard Peninsular accent for media is a Madrid accent.
Castilian ia a region of Spain where the "Spanish" language comes from. But there is not the only language there, and there was repression against the other languages there, specially the basque language.
So, call that language Castilian ia also recognize that other languages exists within the country.
(I'm not spanish nor a speaker, so, I may be wrong)
Spanish is not the preferred nomenclature. Castilian, please.
???
I know there's a divide in that some countries say "Español" and others "Castellano" but I don't think it's a particularly controversial difference.
Aaaaaah "Chinese".
A language family with many mutually unintelligible languages, large variantions in vocabulary and a script that us shared by all of them. And somehow we have to keep treating it as one language, so Winnie the Pooh isnt angry at us.
I'd like to point out that the dialect-language-family distinction is really a continuum. As dialects drift apart from each other, there is no point where God comes in and declares a dialect has graduated into its own language. Mutual intelligibility simply decreases continuously.
For instance, Portuguese and Spanish are widely considered to be different languages, although they are partially mutually intelligible, particularly in written form. Cantonese and Mandarin are less so, but still a bit. My uncle-in-law speaks Canto but can still understand my Mandarin (however, he can't respond). I won't deny that there is a political reason to want to refer to the Chinese/中文 languages as a single "language," but the classification is honestly quite arbitrary. My understanding is that linguists generally place the category of "Chinese" somewhere between "language" and "family."
Is Scots a different language than English? I don't think I could understand someone speaking Scots without incredible concentration.
The reason why English, French and Spanish are among the world's most widespread languages has its roots in the imperial past of the nations where they originate
Must be a hot day in Hong Kong for them to be throwing shade like that. It's true of course but it's true for all of the biggest languages that conquest played a significant part in their dispersal. Chinese, Arabic, etc are left out of the statement for some reason.
What happened to the French speaking African countries?
Also Angola absent from the Portuguese group
German language is missing Austria
No Nigeria for English? Lagos is the largest English speaking city in the world.
I don't think this image accounts for second languages (otherwise Hindi would be twice as big), and as I understand it the reason that English is the official languae of Nigeria even as an independent country is so as not to give anyone's first language priority over any other
It does specify these are first languages/mother tongues. I think English would also be much larger if it included second languages.
Why are Russia, Central Asia, Mongolia, and the Caucasus "Asia Major", and East Asia and South Asia "Asia Minor"? I also think it's weird they split Eastern and Western Europe since Germany and Bulgaria (EDIT: and Poland(EDIT2: and Belarus Ukraine, and Latvia, but they're colored orange as if theyre included in "Asia Minor")) are the only countries I see from the region in the circle. Also Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan being in the "Middle East" seems weird to me.
Right, the gibberish they speak in Austria is not German. Oh wait....
Does every household in New Guinea speak a different language or wtf is going on there
TIL Germany is in Eastern Europe
Very well done!
Minor nitpick though, it's "Telugu", not "Telegu."Japanese only spoken in Indonesia?
That's Javanese, as in the island Java.
Japanese is in the top-left.
