About Speakrow

The linguistic reach tool is the original idea: pick the languages you speak and see what share of the world's population you could hold a conversation with, drawn country by country on a map. The language reach tables answer the same question in reverse, ranking languages by how far each one gets you and how much a second or third one adds.

The country pages give the same data one country at a time. The daily games and visualizations are ways into the same dataset from different directions.

Language shares and official status come from Unicode CLDR, which estimates, for each country, the share of the population speaking each language. CLDR counts both first-language and additional speakers, which is why English reaches far more people here than its native-speaker count would suggest.

Country facts, including capitals, area, land borders, currencies and alternate names, come from the mledoze/countries dataset under ODbL 1.0. Development indicators such as GDP per capita and life expectancy come from World Bank Open Data under CC BY 4.0, and each value carries its own reference year because countries report in different years. Map shapes are Natural Earth. Language snippets in the guess-the-language game are from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Flag images are served by flagcdn.com.

For every country, the population shares of your selected languages are added together and capped at 100%, then multiplied by that country's population. Summing across all 203 countries gives the number of people reached.

The cap is the part that matters. In a country where 90% speak Hindi and 40% speak English, those two languages do not reach 130% of the population. They reach, at most, everyone. This is why a second language adds far less than its raw speaker count implies, and why the biggest gains come from languages spoken where your existing ones are not.

They are estimates, not census counts, and they should be read as approximations. Language demographics are genuinely hard to measure: definitions of what counts as speaking a language vary, many countries do not ask, and several of these figures are modeled rather than observed.

"Reach" means a shared language exists, not that conversation is guaranteed. Someone counted as an English speaker in a country where English is a second language may have very different fluency from a native speaker. Where a value is genuinely missing from a source, it is shown as no data rather than estimated or interpolated.

Speakrow is an independent project, built and maintained by one developer rather than a company or an institution. It has no funding, no editorial board and no affiliation with any of the data providers named above.

The developer's personal site is marcosburlino.com. To report a data error or a bug, use the contact page, or the menu button in the top right of any page.