When considering the relative importance of languages, the criterion of the number of speakers is always the first to appear: What is the most spoken language in the world? How many people speak that language?, etc. But this approach poses a double problem. On the one hand, the counting of speakers is not an exact science and the various available sources give different figures and do not always reach the same rankings. Other factors play a role in determining the “weight” of languages.
This barometer is based on thirteen selected factors because they appear to be relevant, but also because the data were available for each of them. Of course, it is possible to consider other factors than those considered here.
It may seem pointless to «classify» languages in this way and many think that the most important language in the world is their mother tongue, the language in which they studied or the language in which they communicate with their loved ones. In fact these three functions (mother tongue, language of schooling, family language) can sometimes be fulfilled by different languages in the same individual, And it was precisely from the different roles and uses of languages in society that we set this barometer. Each language is characterized by factors whose value may be continuous or discrete, each factor being able to be taken into account, discarded, or affected by an attenuating coefficient which will diminish its relative importance in relation to other factors. Each user can thus create his own classification according to his point of view and/or his personal appreciation of the importance or the merits of the proposed factors.
The genesis of this work dates back to the symposium held in Aix-en-Provence in September 2007. The project has evolved since then since in April 2010, we posted on the website of the Latin Union a barometer of world languages ” which the reader will use to gain an understanding of the method we used to assign a “score” to the different languages considered and determine their “weight”.
One new edition of the barometer was launched online in 2012 . It allowed the classification of a larger number of languages (563 in total) and used an additional factor to perform this classification. A updated version now integrating 634 languages was published in 2017.
Today we are putting online the fourth edition of this barometer. There are now 13 factors available with a new factor related to language writing. You can discover the novelties of this edition as well as the detailed explanation of each of the factors composing the barometer of the languages of the world in the presentation form below.
To access the barometer, we invite you to open the tabulated document below, in which the ranking of world languages according to the thirteen factors studied is given. The weight of each of these factors can be changed according to your preferences to get a personalised classification adapted to your needs.
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