There are 7 billion people on earth and about 7000 languages, but more than half of the world's population speaks one of just 23 languages. This infographic, created by Alberto Lucas Lopéz for the South China Morning Post, shows the relative size of speaker population for all the languages that have over 50 million speakers (based on data from Ethnologue). It shows, quite strikingly, how giant the population of Chinese speakers is, compared to any of the other languages.

　　世界上大约有70亿人口和7000种语言，但是世界人口的一半以上只使用其中的23种语言。这张阿尔贝托·卢卡斯·洛佩兹为南华早报制作的信息图，展示了使用人数超过5000万的语言在使用人数上的相对大小(基于来自Ethnologue的数据)。它相当惊人地展现了，与其他任何语言相比，汉语的使用人数是多么的巨大。

      On closerinspection of the full resolution map, you can see that even when broken down by dialect, Chinese is massive. At 848 million speakers, Mandarin outstrips English by half a billion. "Smaller" dialects like Wu and Cantonese outstrip the entire population of Persian and Malay speakers.

　　仔细研究全分辨率图，你会发现，即使是按照方言划分，汉语的使用人数也是巨大的。普通话的使用者多达8.48亿，比英语的使用者多了将近5亿人。相对较少人使用的吴语和粤语这两种方言的使用者数量，超过了波斯语和马来西亚语使用者人数之和。

　　The image is further broken down by country and region. The smaller areas within each language show the number of speakers in different countries and regions. Although the countries for each language are not comprehensive—countries and regions with small numbers of speakers of that language are grouped together under a single area marked with "+"—the number of smaller areas gives a good picture of nationality and language at a glance. Arabic is spoken in a large number of countries, while Japanese is only spoken in Japan. Nearly half of Bengali speakers live in India.

　　这张图片进一步按照国家和地区来划分。每种语言中较小的区域表明该语言在不同国家和地区的使用者数量。尽管并没有列出所有存在该种语言使用者的国家和地区(用“+”号标记其他拥有少量该种语言使用者的国家和地区)，但是这些小区域的数量清晰地反映了国家和语言。有很多国家都有阿拉伯语使用者，但是只有日本才有日语使用者，而几乎一半的孟加拉语使用者都住在印度。

　　The coloring shows that languages like Spanish and English have wider geographicdistribution than other large languages. With the exception of French, colonial languages like Spanish, English, and Portuguese have many more speakers in the new world than they have in their countries of origin.

　　有颜色区分表明，有的语言(例如西班牙语和英语)与其他语言相比，有着广泛的地理分布。除了法语以外，有些殖民语言(例如西班牙语、英语和葡萄牙语)与原本自己国家相比，在新大陆(即美洲大陆)有更多的使用者。

　　更多精彩内容 >> 新东方网英语频道 

　　全国新东方英语课程搜索

（责任编辑：何莹莹）