this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Data Is Beautiful

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[–] bloubz@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

There is something very wrong with the French part (so I'm assuming with the rest too)

  1. There are 321M native French speakers, not 75M
  2. Some of the countries cited are not countries but extra territorial French regions

Another weird consideration is that they total to 7B people. A lot of people have several native languages

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Some of the missing are left out languages. E.g. there are ~200 million speakers of turkic languages, but they only cited Turkish with ~71 million. Amd they didn't include a single Bantu language. There must be more than 300 million Bantu speakers.

It is also kind of weird that they give numbers to the tenth part while using wild estimates. Turkey has 85 million inhabitants and up to 10 million native speakers outside of turkey. There are no official ethnicity numbers from turkey as ethnicity is not registered. Also no one knows how many turkish speakers exactly live outside of turkey. But they give us numbers to the tenth part? The situation will be similar for the other languages.

[–] bloubz@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think you understood my point. Total should be way higher than global population. They also have very wrong figures and country knowledge

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I was actually just adding more criticism. They obviously negated that people can have more than one native language. There is a lot to criticize on that presentation. I'd file it under "Data can be ugly" tbh.

On the other hand, doing this "cleanly" is imo nearly impossible. The language situation is way to complicated to present "the demographic of languages of the world" in a single graph without oversimplifying and misrepresenting stuff.