With 14 languages you could speak with half the people on earth in their native tongue.

[Deinonysus]

Or 13, if you classify Hindi and Urdu as a single language, but my source does not. As a compromise, I'm counting them as two languages but assuming that if you learn one, you'd might as well learn the other.

Here is my source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... e_speakers (Taken from the 2007 edition of Nationalencyklopedin, a Swedish encyclopedia; there are also updated numbers in 2010 but only for some languages, so I'm ignoring those numbers to keep things consistent)

Welcome to my second installment of a series I'd like to call, "Oversimplified Answers to Language Questions that Nobody Asked Using the Magic of Spreadsheets". Part one was The most represented languages in The Western Canon of Literature™ - by the numbers, which I posted last summer.

Now you may be thinking, when will I have the time to talk to half the people on earth? And that's assuming that someone else has already done the work of figuring out which half speaks my languages. Otherwise, I'll need to speak to everyone on earth, and it will take extra time to go through all of my languages and determine whether each person speaks any of them. Plus, the logistics...

But, that doesn't mean that this skill would be impractical, because it also means you'll have a 50% chance of being able to speak with anyone you meet, anywhere in the world, in their native tongue. And you wouldn't necessarily even need to travel that much. There are allegedly over 800 languages spoken in New York City, and other major world cities should be similarly cosmopolitan. The exact proportion of speakers will vary from place to place, but let's assume that you are travelling to multiple cosmopolitan cities across the globe and it all evens out.

Of course, this is oversimplified. For example, is Arabic really just one language? That's a good question which I'm completely unqualified to answer, so I won't try. I'll just stick to the data set I have, because if we wait for a flawless one we'll never have an answer.

Native vs Total Speakers

Now, why native tongue only, rather than just any language that someone speaks? Well, there are two reasons:

1. "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." - Nelson Mandela
2. If you include second language speakers, you start to get a lot more overlap and it's hard to quantify how many new people each language nets you. An easier measure would be how many countries you could travel to and know an official language, or the majority language if there is no official language. The six UN languages (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese) plus Portuguese cover 135 of the world's 197 countries, or just over 2/3.
   
   Source: This fun Sporcle quiz, which in turn gets its data from the CIA World Factbook. Can you guess them all?

Which 14 Languages?

These nine languages are absolutely necessary to get over 50% with 14 languages (again, counting Hindi and Urdu as two distinct but inseperable languages):

Rank	Language	Family	Native Speakers (million)	Percentage of world population
1	Mandarin (entire branch)	Sino-Tibetan	935	14.10%
2	Spanish	Indo-European	390	5.85%
3	English	Indo-European	365	5.52%
4	Hindi	Indo-European	295	4.46%
5	Arabic	Afro-Asiatic	280	4.23%
6	Portuguese	Indo-European	205	3.08%
7	Bengali (Bangla)	Indo-European	200	3.05%
8	Russian	Indo-European	160	2.42%
21	Urdu	Indo-European	66	0.99%

That gets you to 43.70%. From there, Japanese will allow you to pick any four other languages from ranks 10 to 20. If you skip Japanese you will need Punjabi and German plus three others from this list.

Rank	Language	Family	Native Speakers (million)	Percentage of world population
9	Japanese	Japonic	125	1.92%
10	Punjabi	Indo-European	95	1.44%
11	German	Indo-European	92	1.39%
12	Javanese	Austronesian	82	1.25%
13	Wu (e.g. Shanghainese)	Sino-Tibetan	80	1.20%
14	Malay (inc. Malaysian and Indonesian)	Austronesian	77	1.16%
15	Telugu	Dravidian	76	1.15%
16	Vietnamese	Austroasiatic	76	1.14%
17	Korean	Koreanic	76	1.14%
18	French	Indo-European	75	1.12%
19	Marathi	Indo-European	73	1.10%
20	Tamil	Dravidian	70	1.06%

Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan Only

Of course, it is much easier to learn a language that is related to one you already know. And it is possible to pass the 50% mark without ever straying from two language families: Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan. However, it will take a minimum of 19 languages.

There is a bit of wiggle room at the bottom, but you can't skip any of these 13 languages, which will get you up to 45.72%:

Rank	Language	Family	Native Speakers (million)	Percentage of world population
1	Mandarin (entire branch)	Sino-Tibetan	935	14.10%
2	Spanish	Indo-European	390	5.85%
3	English	Indo-European	365	5.52%
4	Hindi	Indo-European	295	4.46%
6	Portuguese	Indo-European	205	3.08%
7	Bengali (Bangla)	Indo-European	200	3.05%
8	Russian	Indo-European	160	2.42%
10	Punjabi	Indo-European	95	1.44%
11	German	Indo-European	92	1.39%
13	Wu (e.g. Shanghainese)	Sino-Tibetan	80	1.20%
18	French	Indo-European	75	1.12%
19	Marathi	Indo-European	73	1.10%
21	Urdu	Indo-European	66	0.99%

There are several combinations of six of these other languages that will get you over 50%. You can skip either Italian or Yue but not both. With both Italian and Yue, any combination of four others will work, except for the bottom four.

Rank	Language	Family	Native Speakers (million)	Percentage of world population
23	Italian	Indo-European	59	0.90%
24	Yue (incl. Cantonese)	Sino-Tibetan	59	0.89%
26	Gujarati	Indo-European	49	0.74%
27	Jin	Sino-Tibetan	48	0.72%
28	Southern Min (incl. Hokkien and Teochew)	Sino-Tibetan	47	0.71%
29	Persian	Indo-European	45	0.68%
30	Polish	Indo-European	40	0.61%
31	Pashto	Indo-European	39	0.58%
33	Xiang (Hunanese)	Sino-Tibetan	38	0.58%

Families

As of 2007, 85% of the world's population spoke one of these 100 languages.

This list is largely made up of seven great language families. I don't mean "great" as in "very good" (that would completely subjective), but in terms of size: a combination of numbers and diversity. Each of these seven families has at least 4 languages represented in the top 100, and these representatives combine to cover over 2% of the world's population (not even including the smaller languages in these families that are not on this list).

Family	# of Languages	Percentage of world population	Most spoken language (native)
Indo-European	44	41.05%	Spanish
Sino-tibetan	11	19.79%	Mandarin
Afro-Asiatic	5	5.70%	Arabic
Austronesian	9	4.49%	Javanese
Dravidian	4	3.36%	Telugu
Niger-Congo	11	2.28%	Yoruba
Turkic	6	2.21%	Turkish

Together, these seven families comprise 90 of the 100 languages on this list, and 78.88% of the world's population speaks one of those 90 languages.

Indo-European is a bit of an outlier considering that it makes up nearly half of the languages and speakers represented on the list, so it's worth drilling down and seeing which branches of the family are represented:

Branch	# of Languages	Percentage of world population
Indo-Iranian	28	18.16%
Italic	5	11.32%
Germanic	4	7.36%
Slavic	6	4.03%
Hellenic	1	0.18%
Grand Total	44	41.05%

Here you can see that the Indo-Iranian Branch is carrying the lion's share, representing well over half of the Indo-European languages on this list, and nearly half of the speakers of Indo-European languages on this list. Of the Indo-Iranian languages, three are Iranic and the rest are Indo-Aryan.

The rest of the branches are dominated by large global languages: Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Russian. These four languages (all in the top 10) represent the overwhelming majority of the speakers in their respective branches, almost 3/4 of the IE language outside of the Indo-Iranian Branch. By contrast, Hindustani, Bengali, and Punjabi (all also top-10 languages, and remember that we're counting Hindustani together but as two languages) represent just over half of Indo-Iranian speakers represented on this list: a much smaller proportion.

Full Chart

Here is a chart of the full list, with the seven great families color-coded and the ten languages outside of these families left in black and white.

World Language 100a.png

World Language 100b.png

World Language 100c.png

World Language 100d.png

So there you have it. Whether you want to learn 7 widely-official languages, 19 Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages, or 14 languages regardless of family, here is your path forward, provided that you have a few spare decades. Or of course you could just ignore this and keep doing what you're doing, which in fact I would recommend.

With native English and "good enough" French and German, I can have at least a basic conversation with 8.03% of the world's population in their native tongue, and according to the Sporcle quiz I speak at least one official (or majority) language in 85 countries. What's your "score"? And is anyone here actually over the 50% mark or at least close?

[lichtrausch]

For the sake of feasibility, I would recommend slightly lowering the bar to 45% so you can just learn all the large IE languages and then call it a day.

[Gòl·lum]

I don't think I'll live long enough to speak with 3-4 billion people

[rdearman]

I admit I didn't go into all the facts and figures. But do you take into account all the people who speak a second language? Some estimates are that 50% of the population global is bilingual. The most popular 2nd languages are English, French, Russian, Spanish. So wouldn't I have a higher chance of speaking to more people if I knew these most common 2nd languages?

[PeterMollenburg]

Rather than regarding % of native speakers on the planet, if you learned only French and Spanish and already knew English, you’d likely be able to speak to well over 45% or even 50% of the people on the planet, right? I’m guessing. In this I’m considering the number of countries in which these languages are official or simply spoken as L1, L2, L3, L4 etc. This would cover much of North and South America, Africa, Europe, the Pacific and a decent amount of Asia.

If one wanted to then consider the large land masses that remain as black-ish spots (English is pretty well spread far and wide even if only spoken by 1 in 10 or 20 of some parts of the globe), then extending your language mission to Russian, Mandarin, Arabic and Portuguese, at a very rough estimate, I think with these seven languages you could communicate with upwards of 90% of the world’s population covering upwards of 90% of the earth’s land area. (very rough estimates)

[Deinonysus]

I admit I didn't go into all the facts and figures. But do you take into account all the people who speak a second language? Some estimates are that 50% of the population global is bilingual. The most popular 2nd languages are English, French, Russian, Spanish. So wouldn't I have a higher chance of speaking to more people if I knew these most common 2nd languages?

Rather than regarding % of native speakers on the planet, if you learned only French and Spanish and already knew English, you’d likely be able to speak to well over 45% or even 50% of the people on the planet, right? I’m guessing. In this I’m considering the number of countries in which these languages are official or simply spoken as L1, L2, L3, L4 etc. This would cover much of North and South America, Africa, Europe, the Pacific and a decent amount of Asia.

If one wanted to then consider the large land masses that remain as black-ish spots (English is pretty well spread far and wide even if only spoken by 1 in 10 or 20 of some parts of the globe), then extending your language mission to Russian, Mandarin, Arabic and Portuguese, at a very rough estimate, I think with these seven languages you could communicate with upwards of 90% of the world’s population covering upwards of 90% of the earth’s land area. (very rough estimates)

I addressed both of these concerns in the post but it was hidden at the bottom under a wall of charts. I moved it up to near the top so it won't get lost.

For the sake of feasibility, I would recommend slightly lowering the bar to 45% so you can just learn all the large IE languages and then call it a day.

You'd need 44 IE languages to almost hit 45% though. That's a lot of work to skip Mandarin!

[lichtrausch]

You'd need 44 IE languages to almost hit 45% though. That's a lot of work to skip Mandarin!

Once you've learned the 20 largest IE languages you can practically intuit the rest of them.

Just need to stay away from the small subfamilies like Celtic, which don't help on this project anyway.

[devilyoudont]

Japanese and Korean are likely a sprachbund, and take roughly 60% of their vocabulary from Chinese despite being unrelated to Chinese and each other. So it's possible that for someone on an Indo-European + Sino-Tibetan Route, these langauges may make sense if they are not interested in some of the smaller Sino-Tibetan languages

[lavengro]

Fun read, Deinonysus, thanks!

My two take-aways from this:

1. I did not even remotely recognize the name of more than twenty of the languages from your list (and even now I am partly convinced that #76 Chewa is a conlang from the Stars Wars movies rather than a Bantu language); and

2. when trying to speak Italian, I am at jeopardy of up to 0.9% of the world's population saying (in italiano) "What is this fool talking about? It sounds a very little like badly-mangled random Italian words, but equally this fellow may instead be suffering some form of seizure or possession."

[Deinonysus]

Japanese and Korean are likely a sprachbund, and take roughly 60% of their vocabulary from Chinese despite being unrelated to Chinese and each other. So it's possible that for someone on an Indo-European + Sino-Tibetan Route, these langauges may make sense if they are not interested in some of the smaller Sino-Tibetan languages

That's a fair point. You'd might as well add Vietnamese too with a similar proportion of Chinese Loanwords. Those three in addition to the 13 top IE and ST languages will get you just 0.08% shy of the goal.

Let's call it Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan & friends.