51–60 of 116 posts
Also, it would be interesting to see partial overlap cases (e.g. Ukrainian-Belarussian, Russian-Serbian) where one party could understand another but couldn't answer well except in "universal" sign language (or through switching to another common denominator language); though good luck with researching this one.
In my experience a lot of this is quite incomplete. Obviously this uses a dataset like "official languages" of each country. For example, English would grt you very far in the Netherlands, but its not colored. Dutch can get you quite far in South Africa, but its not colored. English in particular should color most of the globe, except countries like Russia, France, and a few other blatant exceptions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A decent proportion of young Scandinavians speak English. Not all of them, and it definitely doesn't extend as a generality to older people.
Eh. That isn't what the comment you replied to is saying. It's enough that it easily puts it with some of the other places that are highlighted as English. The site says "enter the languages you speak below to see with how many parts of the world you can communicate". Quite misleading.
By knowing English, you can communicate with most of the world, because almost every country teaches English as a foreign language. For example, more than half of the popuation of Europe can easily communicate in English. I've seen that in Netherlands they already prefer English to Dutch when they talk to each other. I know 3 foreign languages and I think it's a waste of time to learn more, because if a person is not…
In my experience a lot of this is quite incomplete. Obviously this uses a dataset like "official languages" of each country. For example, English would grt you very far in the Netherlands, but its not colored. Dutch can get you quite far in South Africa, but its not colored. English in particular should color most of the globe, except countries like Russia, France, and a few other blatant exceptions.
> except countries like Russia Can confirm, here it'll be problematic for one to speak in English with anyone younger than 16 / older than 40 and/or outside major population centers. (though in my experience, its the same situation with English in Austria and Russian in Latvia/Lithuania).
Almost the whole of Scandinavia speaks English as a second language, and yet English does not highlight any or the four countries. Most Scandinavian people might agree with this general observation that knowing little to no Nordic language can still get you by very comfortably in that region, although knowing the national language is a plus. Second, China speaks Mandarin and Cantonese (not available), and several reg…
two quick observations: 1. the US isn't included for Spanish, despite the fact that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States. Over 41 million people aged five or older speak Spanish at home. Spanish is also the most learned language other than English, with about six million students. Estimates range from 41 million to over 50 million native speakers, heritage language speakers, and second-lang…
1. Languages don't always neatly map to country borders.
2. Linguistically diverse / multi-ethnic countries can have multiple official languages, and some of those official languages are spoken only in a geographical subset of the country.
3. Languages can be mutually intelligible. Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible and you can get by speaking Urdu in most parts of North India. The Balkan languages are largely mutually intelligible - correct me if I'm wrong.
Cute visualization, half-baked idea.