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:
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 |
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 |
~~~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 |
~~~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
- 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).
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 | |
~~~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:
- English
- French
- German
- Russian
- Ancient Greek
- Spanish
- Italian
- Latin
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?