How many languages are there and which i should support?

There are couple of different statements when it comes to the languages on our planet. According to the ISO 639-3 we talk about 8,873 known languages (dialects included). Worldwide one could say that >85% humans speak in 50 different "main-" languages.

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The top #10 (mother-)tongue:

  • Chinese/Mandarin - ~1.2 Bln humans

  • English - ~440 Mio humans

  • Spanish - ~332 Mio humans

  • Arabic - ~235 Mio humans

  • Bengali - ~215 Mio humans

  • Hindi - ~182 Mio humans

  • Russian - ~180 Mio humans

  • Portugese - ~170 Mio humans

  • Japanese - ~125 Mio humans

  • German - ~98 Mio humans


However, this list only shows us the number of those who speak the language as their mother tongue. Of course, a lot more people speak German or English or Spanish ... but this numbers can be relevant to our decision, what language (s) one should select for his videos. It is so to speak an indicator in which direction you should go.

To make an even better decision here the 12 most used languages in the world:

  1. Englisch - ~1.5 Bln humans

  2. Chinesisch - ~1.1 Bln humans

  3. Hindi - ~650 Mio humans

  4. Spanisch - ~420 Mio humans

  5. Französisch - ~370 Mio humans

  6. Arabisch - ~Mio humans

  7. Russisch - ~Mio humans

  8. Portugiesisch - ~235 Mio humans

  9. Bengali - ~233 Mio humans

  10. Deutsch - ~185 Mio humans

  11. Japanisch - ~128 Mio humans

  12. Koreanisch - ~78 Mio humans


Natural addition to the language itself, the mentality of the country is very important, so it may be that you love to see baseball games in the U.S. and it therefore makes a lot of sense to translate them into English, but perhaps in the Ukraine  only a very small portion has an interest.

Basically, you can of course always say: Do your video in English and it can be seen by many people. But here it would be greatly reduced and would not exploit all the benefits of alugha, because that makes this system so strong. For a German YouTuber it is always very useful to add an English language track to the German video, so you would be able to reach a very large audience. You should take the effort to use our analysis tools and to see exactly where the individual viewer is coming from. Then you can specifically address the audience and let it grow steadily.
CodeNameViewsPercentage
engEnglish418 83.6%
deuDeutsch82 16.4%
Total500100%

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