César Hidalgo of MIT led a research team to examine which are the most influential languages spoken by people around the world.
The research team also went into great lengths to find out which language had the “greatest ability to reach other people by being translated”—Hidalgo told Serious Science that “of the many languages that have ever been spoken, only a few of them have been able to achieve global prominence”.
The researchers concluded their data by getting statistics from books that were translated from one language into another, articles that had been edited on Wikipedia by humans, and tweets that were sent by 17 million Twitter users, spanning over 73 languages.
Head over here to see the comprehensive analysis on their interactive version of the map.
[via IFL Science, images via MIT]