When we are young we first learn the language from the people around us. This helps us to communicate, share ideas and learn from them. Most of the time just this is just one, but it can be more than one. The last decades the network of people that human being know (due to globalisation) has shifted from knowing just the people in your local area to people all across the world. In order to effectively communicate with other people from across the world it is useful to speak a shared language.
Finding data ❧
You’re right about data here. I follow some research out of the MIT Media lab by Cesar Hidalgo who may have some interesting data resources if you poke around.
Some additional starting points:
- https://boffosocko.com/2016/02/01/global-language-networks/
- https://boffosocko.com/2015/06/08/a-world-of-languages-and-how-many-speak-them-infographic/
Annotated on September 11, 2020 at 09:52AM
Very very interesting. Definitely gonna dive deeper into this. Thanks for sharing this with me.
You may find it aggregated in other larger corpora, but here’s a link to the most recent language census for England and Wales from 2011 which will break out further details there that you don’t currently show: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/language/articles/languageinenglandandwales/2013-03-04
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