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Lived in the Philippines for 3 years. Yes, people in Manila speak English, especially in wealthy parts of town but even there it is often difficult to have a coherent conversation in a cab or a store. It is much worse in the province. We expect Filipinos to speak perfect English when they immigrate to the US but many do not. I see this daily in the hospital I work at. We get translators for everyone else (Vietnamese, mandarin) but not for our filipino patients. They often struggle and are embarrassed to admit that they don‘t understand.
This map only shows in what language, if it's not their native language, people in a particular country are more comfortable reading Wikipedia articles, compared to other languages.
It doesn't necessarily mean that they're fluent in it, just maybe good enough to read it.
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Thanks for your response. I know that Filipinos value education greatly and that many languages are spoken. Just wanted to point out that one should not assume that everyone speaks perfect English. I regret not having picked up more Tagalog when I lived there. I hope that Filipinos in the US have the courage to demand language interpreters when they need them in the hospital.
On Cuba, they have their own encyclopedia called EcuRed - it's quite fascinating tbh
https://www.ecured.cu/Estados_Unidos
Very interesting. In the first paragraph it already talks about imperialism and lack of medical services.
THE US CONSUMES TOO MUCH ENERGY
Very interesting that they focus on the terminology of America and American.
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When the USA first came to be, they were the only independent American country in the Americas, so they got to monopolize the term American.
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Because ‘America’ as a continent doesn’t exist in English, it’s two continents known collectively as ‘the Americas’ so in English the USA is the only country and place in general with ‘America’ as the proper noun without a cardinal direction preceding, but not the only place with ‘united states’ in its name, hence it makes the most logical sense to abbreviate ad ‘America’ and thus its people as ‘Americans’ in English, plus its much less clunky to say than ‘United-Statesian’ in English anyway, it doesn’t work as well as it does in Spanish.
Yesss, this is my favourite pointless internet argument after "whose sport is better"! Please continue!
…yeah? That’s interesting to me. Idk why you’re downvoting people for finding things interesting.
Source: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Most_popular_edition_of_Wikipedia_by_country.svg
Most popular language edition of Wikipedia by country in April 2021, based on pageviews data from the Wikimedia API. Code used to generate the data: https://github.com/a455bcd9/wikilangtrends
Legend:
ar - العربية
de - Deutsch
en - English
es - español
fr - français
pt - português
ru - русский
zh - 中文
(gray territories - other languages)
TIL 'ZH' is the ISO code for the Chinese language of Mandarin.
Anyway, thanks for sharing. Interesting to see how a handful of languages cover some parts of many countries.
China - Zhong Guo, Chinese - Zhong Wen
Greenland isn't gray?!
Also Western Sahara!
North Korea
That’s honestly the most surprising to me. How many North Koreans speak Russian or have acces to the Wikipedia? Or is there a significant Russian minority?
Somebody wrote that the Korean language Wikipedia is banned in North Korea, because it's edited by South Koreans.
But I'm not sure if it's true, and how that even is possible to implement -- i.e. to ban one language but allow another.
Blackhole "ko.wikipedia.org" links and not do the same with "ru.wikipedia.org"? Why would it be a problem?
That would explain at least why it isn’t the Korean language wikipedia. I wonder how widely taught English or Russian are in North Korean schools.
Okay, I think what's going on here is that Wikipedia is blocked altogether (all languages) in North Korea along with all other websites, but some embassies might still have access to the full internet, and maybe employees at the Russian embassy are the only users of Wikipedia in entire North Korea.
Kim jong in us the only person online so it kinda makes sense
... what are you doing Romania?
Fine thank you, he he ... :)
What language would you expect there? French?
... because the native wiki isn't developed at all.
Why not French or German, French may be mostly unintelligible but in large part the vocab has huge overlap and why learn English instead of German? I'm sure the Germans love to obsessively expand and correct Wikipedia articles? it seems like a very German thing to spend time doing.
Russian, probably, or for it be grayed out like the others
Why would Romania read the Russian Wikipedia?
Well I know Romanian is a Romance language, not Slavic, but Soviet occupation bla bla bla, you know the drill
Surprised about Suriname. Isn’t the Dutch Wikipedia fairly large?
Yeah definitely a bit surprising. An english-based creole is widely spoken, but that doesn't necessarily make reading an encyclopedia entry in English realistic for someone who speaks it.
Mfw North Korea has data and South Korea doesn't
Best Korea wins again
South Korea has data. Their most-used language (Korean) is not one of the eight languages shown in the legend, thus they're gray.
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It's just a joke man, I quite enjoy some kpop songs in fact :D
Wow. That’s super surprising.
Wikipedia has far more English articles
And the most spoken language corresponds with the most used Wikipedia pages of that language. /s I’m being an asshole. It is actually interesting that India, other parts of Southern Asia, and a lot of Africa prefer English. And Mongolia? I guess that shows how little I know about these countries.
What, specifically, are you surprised by?
Probably English in places like SE Asia and Eastern Africa.
That shouldn't be surprising.
English is the main international lingua franca in both regions.
Is wikipedia really allowed in China? Is it just a fraction of the actual site?
According to wikipedia itself:
Yes it’s banned in China, while there’re still many Chinese editors who constantly infiltrating Wikipedia, like editing pages about Hong Kong protests into CCP’s mouthpiece.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58559412.amp
It’s interesting that Luxembourgers’ favorite is neither French nor German
Interesting that Suriname, A Dutch speaking country uses the English speaking version.
Québec is French BTW. It's a province in Canada 😉
The real division of the world.
I am surprise by country wich use more french than english
Russian wiki in NK? Interesting, I would expect Chinese
Okay, I think what's going on here is that Wikipedia is blocked altogether (all languages) in North Korea along with all other websites, but some embassies might still have access to the full internet, and maybe employees at the Russian embassy are the only users of Wikipedia in entire North Korea.
English empire be like
OH GOD HELP
THERES PIECES OF ME EVERYWHERE
GOD
MY LUNGS ARE LEAKING OUT OF MY LEGS HELP PLEASE
This map should be shown to all those mofos who claim that Chinese / Mandarin is the most widespread language in the world, which it is not.
Does anyone actually say that?
People do say that Chinese is the most spoken native language...which is true.
Yes, people do say that it's the most widely spoken language, and I'm so sick and tired of it, seriously.
You guys may downvote me as much as you want.
Can you provide any examples?
I just googled "most widely spoken languages in the world" and one of the top results was this site:
https://art.tn/img/3242/en/worlds_five_most_spoken_languages/3/5.html
This is just an example.
Someone has a hate boner.
Why you gotta do Kosovo like that?
So like 30 languages cover 99.9% of wikipedia?
I think languages in grey is more interesting than colored ones.
Quebec?