Determining the primary language in a given country isn’t too tough, because it’s usually the official language. But what about the second-most used tongue?
Olivet Nazarene University developed this neat little interactive that demonstrates the secondary language by popularity, where that data is available, for each of the world’s countries. There are some interesting applications for this kind of data beyond knowing that Mandarin is effectively Australia’s second language according to thus data (1.6 per cent of the population) or that Wolof is the most commonly-used language in Senegal, even though French is the official language.
This incredible interactive graphic shows the second most common language in every country [Business Insider]
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One response to “What’s The Second Most Common Language In Each Country?”
The stats for Australia mustn’t be very high… Reason I suspect this is because when our resident feelgoods decided to throw out some facts about multiculturalism in Australia, the best they could come up with was, “Did you know that after English, the most commonly-spoken languages in Australia are, [LISTS THIRTEEN LANGUAGES]?”
I probably could have guessed at this, yes. I’d have come pretty close to guessing this if I put every language in the world on a dartboard and threw a dart while blindfolded.
The stats for percentage of population who speak other languages must’ve been so statistically insignificant that it was almost impossible to determine mathematically any kind of difference, so for safety’s sake they just listed them all.
In 2011, 81% of Australians aged 5 years and over, spoke only English at home while 2% didn’t speak English at all. The most common languages spoken at home (other than English) were Mandarin (1.7%), Italian (1.5%), Arabic (1.4%), Cantonese (1.3%) and Greek (1.3%).