speakrow.

How much of the world can you talk to?

Reach by language →
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About this tool

What this tool measures

Linguistic reach is the share of the world's population you could hold a conversation with, given the languages you speak. It is not the same as adding up speaker counts, because the calculation works country by country and caps coverage at 100% of each country's population before summing. Speaking English alone reaches an estimated 20.2% of humanity, roughly 1.6 billion people. Adding Spanish takes that to 26%. Of the 411 languages in this dataset, only 25 reach even 1% of the world's population on their own, which is the real reason a handful of languages dominate every list like this one.

How to use it

  1. Select every language you can hold a conversation in, not only the ones you have studied formally. Reach counts practical communication, so a language you speak but cannot write still counts.
  2. Watch the map fill in. Each country lights up in the color of the language covering it, at an opacity that tracks how much of the population you reach there.
  3. Try adding one more language and watch which number moves. The answer is often not the language with the most speakers.

What each number means

Global reach
The percentage of the world's population you can communicate with, against a world population of 8.1 billion. This is the headline figure.
People
The same figure as a count of individuals rather than a percentage. It is the sum, across all 203 countries, of each country's population multiplied by the share of it your languages cover.
Countries covered
How many countries you reach at least 10% of. The threshold exists because a language spoken by a fraction of a percent of a country is not meaningfully coverage of that country.
Survival score
How many countries you reach at least 40% of: the rough point where you could expect to find someone to talk to without looking hard. It is a deliberately blunt measure and has nothing to do with whether a language is official there.
Polyglot status
A light-hearted label for where your reach sits relative to well-known multilingual speakers. It carries no data of its own.

How to read the map

Unlit land is a country none of your languages reach. A solid fill means one of your languages covers it, colored for that language. Diagonal stripes mean two or more of your languages are spoken there, one stripe per language.

Fill opacity tracks coverage: the more of a country's population you reach, the more solid the color. A faint country is one where your language is present but spoken by a small share of people, which is common for colonial-era languages in countries with strong local ones.

Where the numbers come from

Speaker shares per country come from Unicode CLDR, which estimates what proportion of each country's population speaks each language, counting both first-language and additional speakers. Population and country facts come from the openly licensed mledoze/countries dataset. A language spoken by under 0.5% of a country's population is excluded unless it holds official status there.

These are estimates, not census counts. Language demographics are genuinely hard to measure: definitions of what counts as speaking a language differ, many countries never ask, and several figures are modeled rather than observed. Read the totals as approximations with a wide margin.

"Reach" means a shared language exists, not that conversation is guaranteed. For the full ranking of languages and combinations, and a longer treatment of the method, see how far each language reaches.

Common questions

Why is my percentage lower than my languages' speaker counts added together?
Because coverage is capped at 100% inside each country before anything is summed. In a country where 90% of people speak Hindi and 40% also speak English, those two languages do not reach 130% of that country's population; they reach everyone, and that is counted once. The overlap between your languages is therefore never double counted, which is why a second language usually adds far less than its global speaker total suggests, and why the biggest gains come from a language spoken somewhere your existing ones are not.
Does this count second-language speakers?
Yes. The underlying Unicode CLDR figures count both first-language and additional speakers, which is why English reaches far more people here than its native-speaker population would imply. This is also the main reason the numbers should be read as estimates: fluency among second-language speakers varies enormously, and a shared language existing is not the same as a conversation going well.
Are my selected languages saved?
Yes, in your own browser's local storage, so they survive a reload and a switch between the mobile and desktop layouts. Nothing is sent to a server and there is no account. Clearing your browser data for this site clears the selection with it.
Why does a country have diagonal stripes?
Diagonal stripes mean more than one of your selected languages is spoken in that country, with each stripe colored for one language. A solid fill means a single one of your languages covers it. The opacity of the fill tracks how much of that country's population you reach, so a faint country is one where your languages are present but held by a small share of people.
Is this the same data as the country pages?
It is the same source and the same calculation. The tool reads a live database while the country pages are built from a checked-in copy of it, so a figure can occasionally lag by one data refresh. Automated tests compare the two datasets to keep them in step, and any difference you see between them is a bug worth reporting.

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