Speak My Language

Tick the languages you speak and find out how much of the world's population you can have a conversation with — plus a colour-coded map showing where those speakers live. Data is the 2004 snapshot from Encarta-via-the-original-Zope-project; updating to a current dataset is a future job.

Tick the languages you speak. The map shades countries by what fraction of their population you'd be able to talk to. Adding the right second language is often more leverage than you'd expect — Chinese is the obvious one, but Hindi adds 180 million in a single click.

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Add a language

Data: 2004 snapshot of speakers and country populations (150 languages, 213 countries). An asterisk on a country mark means that language is a second language there. Background: Learning languages 4 at a time — the original post about scraping the language data and what you'd actually need to learn to talk to most of humanity.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue. -- Seneca