There are 7 billion people on earth and about 7000 languages, but more than half of the world’s population speaks one of just 23 languages. This infographic, created by Alberto Lucas Lopéz for the South China Morning Post, shows the relative size of speaker population for all the languages that have over 50 million speakers (based on data from Ethnologue). It shows, quite strikingly, how giant the population of Chinese speakers is, compared to any of the other languages.
世界上大約有70億人口和7000種語言，但是世界人口的一半以上只使用其中的23種語言。這張阿爾貝托·盧卡斯·洛佩茲為南華早報制作的信息圖，展示了使用人數(shù)超過5000萬的語言在使用人數(shù)上的相對大小(基于來自Ethnologue的數(shù)據(jù))。它相當驚人地展現(xiàn)了，與其他任何語言相比，漢語的使用人數(shù)是多么的巨大。
On closerinspection of the full resolution map, you can see that even when broken down by dialect, Chinese is massive. At 848 million speakers, Mandarin outstrips English by half a billion. "Smaller" dialects like Wu and Cantonese outstrip the entire population of Persian and Malay speakers.
仔細研究全分辨率圖，你會發(fā)現(xiàn)，即使是按照方言劃分，漢語的使用人數(shù)也是巨大的。普通話的使用者多達8.48億，比英語的使用者多了將近5億人。相對較少人使用的吳語和粵語這兩種方言的使用者數(shù)量，超過了波斯語和馬來西亞語使用者人數(shù)之和。
The image is further broken down by country and region. The smaller areas within each language show the number of speakers in different countries and regions. Although the countries for each language are not comprehensive—countries and regions with small numbers of speakers of that language are grouped together under a single area marked with "+"—the number of smaller areas gives a good picture of nationality and language at a glance. Arabic is spoken in a large number of countries, while Japanese is only spoken in Japan. Nearly half of Bengali speakers live in India.
這張圖片進一步按照國家和地區(qū)來劃分。每種語言中較小的區(qū)域表明該語言在不同國家和地區(qū)的使用者數(shù)量。盡管并沒有列出所有存在該種語言使用者的國家和地區(qū)(用“+”號標記其他擁有少量該種語言使用者的國家和地區(qū))，但是這些小區(qū)域的數(shù)量清晰地反映了國家和語言。有很多國家都有阿拉伯語使用者，但是只有日本才有日語使用者，而幾乎一半的孟加拉語使用者都住在印度。
The coloring shows that languages like Spanish and English have wider geographicdistribution than other large languages. With the exception of French, colonial languages like Spanish, English, and Portuguese have many more speakers in the new world than they have in their countries of origin.
有顏色區(qū)分表明，有的語言(例如西班牙語和英語)與其他語言相比，有著廣泛的地理分布。除了法語以外，有些殖民語言(例如西班牙語、英語和葡萄牙語)與原本自己國家相比，在新大陸(即美洲大陸)有更多的使用者。
