The most represented languages in The Western Canon of Literature™ - by the numbers

[Deinonysus]

I was wondering what the most important languages (or at least most represented languages) were in the Western Canon of Literature™, and I couldn't find a decent answer so I went through three sources and came up with my own.

I assumed that the four main languages would be English, French, German, and Russian, with crucial works in Spanish and Italian, and of course with Latin and Ancient Greek being important for the Classics. And the sources do seem to confirm this, although they do provide some extra nuance and allow me to rank the languages to a degree. English dominates every list, and with that removed French dominates every list (except for Bloom's "Theocratic Age", for works written before modern English and French existed). After that, ranking is a bit tougher and can depend on what you're interested in, but I do have a final ranking at the end (which is based on these sources alone).

My three sources were:

• https://thegreatestbooks.org/
• List of Nobel Laureates in Literature
• Harold Bloom's The Western Canon

The first two sources are not officially Western Canon per se, but thegreatestbooks.org is compiled from Western sources and the Nobel Prize is awarded by Swedes who are undoubtably heavy English users, so although there are exceptions this does mostly end up as a Western Canon in practice.

A few disclaimers:

• I had to do some heavy manual editing wrangle these sources into Excel, so expect errors.
• I'm definitely not a literature professor or anyone with any qualifications along those lines, just a plucky spreadsheet jockey with a question that needed answering.
• Obviously this is not an attempt to measure the worth of languages or the people that speak them, only to measure their representation in the Western Canon of Literature™ based on their representation on some convenient lists.

~~~thegreatestbooks.org~~~

This list is compiled from 116 "best of" lists (see the site for more details). There are just over 2000 entries on the full list, but I only looked at the top 100. The top 10 are:

Rank	Title	Author	Language
1	In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust	French
2	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	Spanish
3	Ulysses	James Joyce	English
4	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	English
5	Moby Dick	Herman Melville	English
6	Hamlet	William Shakespeare	English
7	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	Russian
8	The Odyssey	Homer	Ancient Greek
9	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Spanish
10	The Divine Comedy	Dante Alighieri	Italian

Note that other than English, Spanish is the only language with multiple entries in the top 10. However, it drops off sharply and only picks up one more book in the top 100:

Language	Count of Language
English	59
French	11
Russian	9
Ancient Greek	6
German	6
Spanish	3
Italian	2
Latin	2
Danish	1
Arabic	1
Grand Total	100

With English, French, Russian, Ancient Greek, and German, you can read over 90% of the top 100, although if you skip Spanish you'll miss two of the top 10.

~~~Nobel Prize in Literature~~~

Some people won for two languages, and I counted them twice, once for each language.

Language	Count of Language
English	31
French	15
German	13
Spanish	11
Swedish	7
Italian	6
Russian	6
Polish	4
Norwegian	3
Danish	3
Greek	2
Japanese	2
Chinese	2
Czech	1
Finnish	1
Portuguese	1
Provençal	1
Serb	1
Turkish	1
Bengali	1
Arabic	1
Hebrew	1
Yiddish	1
Hungarian	1
Icelandic	1
Grand Total	117

You can cover 60% of these with the top four languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. If you're a Swedish Academy completist, add Swedish to get almost up to 2/3, and then throw in Italian and Russian to get up to around 3/4.

~~~Harold Bloom's The Western Canon~~~

A few considerations:

• This list did not include what language each text is in, so I did my best with my Google-Fu. I listed the Apocrypha twice, under Latin and Koine Greek.
• Bloom only includes The Bible in the King James Translation into English. I added lines for the Hebrew Tanakh (Old Testament) and Koine Greek New Testament (ignoring passages in any other languages such as Aramaic).
• The number of times an author is listed is not a useful measure. Unlike Thegreatestbooks.org, this list is not ranked, and Bloom simply included as many works as he felt were needed for a given author. Shakespeare only has one entry, Plays and Poems. Victor Hugo has seven entries, including one called William Shakespeare. Of course M. Hugo was a very important author, but was he seven times as important as Shakespeare? Probably not. So I didn't count the number of works that a language had, but the number of authors. Works with no author listed each count as one author.
• Bloom divides the list into four Ages:
  
  • The Theocratic Age (2000 BCE - 1321 CE)
  • The Aristocratic Age (1321-1832)
  • The Democratic Age (1832-1900)
  • The Chaotic Age: 20th Century
  These ages vary greatly in number of authors; the Theocratic Age lists only 58 authors and the Chaotic Age has 490. Since an overall count would be hopelessly biased toward the 20th Century (which Bloom said was his least secure list), I simply list each age separately.
• For brevity's sake, I only list different stages of a language in the Theocratic Age. So, the Nibelungenlied (Theocratic Age) is Middle High German, but the Canterbury Tales (Aristocratic Age) are just English. The "modern" is implied for any modern languages, so I split Greek into Ancient Greek, Koine Greek, and just Greek. I just lumped Hebrew into one category because of the two works in the Theocratic Age, I couldn't figure out a stage for one (Sayings of the Fathers) and I added the other entry myself (the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament).

Now on to the list:

Age/Language	Count of Language	% of Age
The Theocratic Age	58
Ancient Greek	20	34%
Latin	17	29%
Sanskrit	3	5%
Old Icelandic	2	3%
Koine Greek	2	3%
Old Spanish	2	3%
Hebrew	2	3%
Arabic	2	3%
Middle High German	2	3%
Old French	2	3%
Anglo-Saxon	1	2%
Sumerian	1	2%
Egyptian	1	2%
English	1	2%
The Aristocratic Age	138
English	74	54%
French	26	19%
Italian	19	14%
Spanish	11	8%
German	6	4%
Portuguese	2	1%
The Democratic Age	158
English	97	61%
French	20	13%
German	15	9%
Russian	14	9%
Italian	6	4%
Spanish	3	2%
Swedish	1	1%
Norwegian	1	1%
Portuguese	1	1%
The Chaotic Age	507
English	275	54%
French	60	12%
Spanish	31	6%
German	29	6%
Italian	21	4%
Russian	18	4%
Hebrew	14	3%
Yiddish	12	2%
Catalan	6	1%
Greek	6	1%
Polish	6	1%
Portuguese	6	1%
Czech	5	1%
Swedish	4	1%
Arabic	4	1%
Serbo-Croatian	3	1%
Hungarian	3	1%
Danish	2	0%
Norwegian	2	0%
Grand Total	861

As could be expected, Ancient Greek and Latin dominate the Theocratic Age, and English and French dominate everything else. From there, Italian is the next most dominant in the Aristocratic age, and Russian and German are basically tied in the Democratic Age. The Chaotic age has a sharp dropoff after French's 12% stake, with Spanish and German at 6% and Italian and Russian at 4%. Yiddish and Hebrew are the only other two languages above 1%; however, they may be over-represented because Bloom "was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew (wiki)", just as Swedish is probably inflated in the Nobel standings and English is probably inflated on all of these lists.

~~~Summary~~~

If I had to rank the languages based on these lists — and again, this is not a judgement on the worth of these languages or their speakers, or on the wonderful literary traditions in many languages that are not well represented on these lists — this is how I would do it:

1. English
2. French
3. German
4. Russian
5. Ancient Greek
6. Spanish
7. Italian
8. Latin

The other languages on these lists are not well represented enough to really rank.

Even accounting for bias, English is the clear winner, and French is a clear second. The rest were more difficult to rank. German and Russian are extremely close: Russian wins the Greatestbooks top 100, German wins in Nobels, and Bloom's list is the tiebreaker with wins for German in each age (winning by just one author in the Democratic age). While the Ancient Greeks clearly were not getting posthumous nobel prizes, they dominated the Theocratic age and beat out Spanish and Italian on the Greatestbooks top 100. Spanish then beats out Italian in almost every metric, despite losing the Aristocratic and Democratic ages. And finally, while Latin is clearly important, it does not seem to merit a higher ranking than any of the 7 other languages on the list.

If you learn these eight languages, you will be able to read the bulk of these representations of the Western Canon of Literature™ in the original. If you can read this you already have a big head start with English, and you can probably take care of the rest in a couple of spare weekends here and there, right?

[kanewai]

Nice work!

Interesting side note - Harold Bloom actually disavowed his list, said he wrote it without much thought after his editors insisted on it, and he fought to keep it out of future editions of his book.

[nooj]

Do you think if a French person or a German had been the one to create this list, the list would be different? E.g. a German including works that were not included by the English speaker.

[Adrianslont]

Do you think if a French person or a German had been the one to create this list, the list would be different? E.g. a German including works that were not included by the English speaker.

THIS list is a meta-list derived from three other lists. It would have turned out the same if the “spreadsheet jockey” was French, German or Chinese.

I imagine it would have turned out differently if Harold Bloom was French and the Nobel prize awarded by Germans. Or if lists from France or Germany or elsewhere were sourced. I’ve seen such lists - I can’t remember if I ended up looking at them after reading a similar thread here.

[zenmonkey]

Do you think if a French person or a German had been the one to create this list, the list would be different? E.g. a German including works that were not included by the English speaker.

THIS list is a meta-list derived from three other lists. It would have turned out the same if the “spreadsheet jockey” was French, German or Chinese.

I imagine it would have turned out differently if Harold Bloom was French and the Nobel prize awarded by Germans. Or if lists from France or Germany or elsewhere were sourced. I’ve seen such lists - I can’t remember if I ended up looking at them after reading a similar thread here.

Overall, nicely done - always interesting to see what comes out of these analysis.
Personally, that most certainly would not be my top 10 list of "Western Cannon".

Harold Bloom doesn't read and of those major western languages other than English (he speaks Yiddish and Hebrew) - his exposure and access to "cannon" is only through translation. Therefore his choices are going to be influenced by that. There are other, non-English lists of overall "western cannon" that could be included - from Otto Maria Carpeaux, H.R. Curtius or Le Monde’s Books of the Century, to name a few, that would weigh less towards "Dead White Men translated into English" and more towards "Dead White Men".

But I'm curious about the choices of the list - doesn't thegreatestbooks.org already include the Nobels and Bloom's work?

[Deinonysus]

Nice work!

Interesting side note - Harold Bloom actually disavowed his list, said he wrote it without much thought after his editors insisted on it, and he fought to keep it out of future editions of his book.

Thanks!

I did hear about that. I don't think he necessarily thought it was a bad list for what it was, but he thought it was frivolous and distracted from the main body of his book. And in a sense he's right. I combed through his entire list, but I haven't read the book (although I'm definitely planning on it!).

It definitely suited my purposes, because it's the largest list I could find that was easily pasteable into Excel.

[Deinonysus]

Do you think if a French person or a German had been the one to create this list, the list would be different? E.g. a German including works that were not included by the English speaker.

THIS list is a meta-list derived from three other lists. It would have turned out the same if the “spreadsheet jockey” was French, German or Chinese.

I imagine it would have turned out differently if Harold Bloom was French and the Nobel prize awarded by Germans. Or if lists from France or Germany or elsewhere were sourced. I’ve seen such lists - I can’t remember if I ended up looking at them after reading a similar thread here.

If I were French or Chinese, I may have come up with different sources, which may be biased in different directions. As we have seen, each source is biased towards the languages its creators speak.

That being said, I think that English bias is unavoidable. Members of a French committee would likely speak English but not necessarily German. A German committee would likely speak English but not necessarily French. Any trilingual members may speak all three, but a bilingual member would probably have learned English. And English is also probably the first Western language that a Chinese critic will learn, et cetera.

So if you compile lists from many different languages, each will be biased towards their own languages and also towards English, so you would cancel out the mother tongue biases but not the English bias.

I did quickly google search of « les meilleurs livres du monde » and I found one article about Le monde's top 100, and the rest were French articles about a survey by the Norwegian Bokklubben World Library. And it's a great list, I should have included it in my original post! The Wiki article was kind enough to include a breakdown by language, so here's the summary with almost no extra work on my part:

Language	Count of Language
English	29
French	11
German	10
Russian	9
Spanish	6
Italian	5
Greek	5
Sanskrit	3
Portuguese	3
Arabic	3
Norwegian	2
Classical Latin	2
Persian	2
Japanese	2
Danish	1
French, English	1
Chinese	1
Old Norse	1
Swedish	1
Icelandic	1
Akkadian	1
Hebrew	1
Grand Total	100

This count follows my ranking based on the other three sources very closely, so searching in French doesn't seem to have changed much.

Edit: What makes that list so great is that they sent surveys to "one hundred writers from 54 countries", so this may be as close as you can get to an unbiased single list. The full list of surveyed authors is in the wiki article.

[Deinonysus]

Overall, nicely done - always interesting to see what comes out of these analysis.
Personally, that most certainly would not be my top 10 list of "Western Cannon".

Harold Bloom doesn't read and of those major western languages other than English (he speaks Yiddish and Hebrew) - his exposure and access to "cannon" is only through translation. Therefore his choices are going to be influenced by that. There are other, non-English lists of overall "western cannon" that could be included - from Otto Maria Carpeaux, H.R. Curtius or Le Monde’s Books of the Century, to name a few, that would weigh less towards "Dead White Men translated into English" and more towards "Dead White Men".

But I'm curious about the choices of the list - doesn't thegreatestbooks.org already include the Nobels and Bloom's work?

I'm sure it's very hard to narrow it down to just 10!

Good point about the Nobels and Bloom's list! I hadn't thought of that! As it turns out, surprisingly, neither list is part of the 116. It does include a list by Bloom, but not that one.

Thegreatestbooks.org weights lists differently based on different factors, and some of the highest weighted sources are from French or Spanish language sources. The highest weighted source was the Norwegian Book Club survey that I mentioned in the above post, so I guess I did unwittingly include it after all.

[IronMike]

I love Bloom's Western Canon and use it whenever I'm at a loss of what to read or I want to read a new author and I'm not sure what book to start with. The book (as a separate entity from the list) itself is awesome. I'd add Who Killed Homer? (Hanson) and From Dawn to Decadence (Barzun) to a list of similar reads. Barzun's is such a great read and you'll discover books you've never heard of before. One can easily get lost in that book.

[Cavesa]

Of course the canon is always heavily biased. That's why prof. Arguelles came up with his own list and it is a big part of his polyglottery.

http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/great_books.html
Here, you can read a lot about the canon, about the usual bias, about his opinions, and about his own list. He has also been compiling several lists (I am not sure whether he finished and published them) concerning non western literature, and a list focused on the 20th century authors

The best part is The Expanded Comprehensive Canon for Western Civilization, which is done exactly with the usually biases on mind.

It is a larger compendium. I don't agree that much with his choices for Czech, I think there are better representants than for example Klicpera, and better works, but that is just a personal opinion. (You would be astonished by the sheer stupidity of one version of the new canon for Czech high school leaving exams, so many Czech works were there despite being horrible compared to the world literature, and even the world selection was rather weird. The bias is not just in the anglophone countries).

I find this book much more interesting.

When it comes to the Nobel prizes, let's not forget some of the choices were also political (for example Karel Čapek), and it is always just one book. I think the laureates together with the nominees would make a much more representative sample.

The list of nominees is not public for 50 years. Right now, it is possible to consult only the list 1901-1963. It is not too easy to navigate and sometimes it is not clear what language did the author write in, it would take a while but might be worth going through. I'll consider it later in the night