A while back I made a video translating dance songs into English. In that video, I asked Nerdfighters to go to this thread and post what language they speak. Then, an amazing thing happened. A linguist and nerdfighter named Hedvig compiled a quite complicated spreadsheet of all the languages spoken in Nerdfighteria. Hedvig can say it better than me though so…
In case you’re interested, the languages spoken by members of nerdfighteria are roughly 110, most of them belong to the some of largest language families of the world: indo-european, afro-asiatic, niger-congo (only bantu), sino-tibean or austronesian.
The third largest language family in terms of number of languages is Trans-New-Guinea and no language was represented from that group (no wonder, it doesn’t have that many speakers).
These six families cover 64% of all languages and are spoken by 85% of the worlds population, as native tongues that is.
In this case most nerdfighters speak one language from these six families that is very big (like russian, malay or portuguese), so even though we don’t speak all languages in these five families we still represent roughly 72% of the worlds population. This is interesting when we think about the fact that we speak 1.6% of the languages, but still we cover so many speakers. Languages of the world are distributed a big like Zips Law, most have extremely low number of speakers and a few are extremely huge.
So Cool! Thanks so much to Hedvig for putting this together. You can see the full spreadsheet here, and if you speak a language that is not on the list, just let us know in the chat.
