See how much of the world you can unlock by learning a language

Pick the languages you speak and the map paints every place where those languages are spoken natively, down to specific regions within each country. Add a new language and watch the color spread.

The stats panel counts the speakers you could talk to, the countries those speakers live in, and the geographic area those languages cover. Use it to compare the marginal payoff of adding, say, Portuguese versus Swahili versus Hindi. The answer shifts a lot depending on what you already speak.

Nothing here ranks languages by worth. A Nigerian speaker of Yoruba and Hausa reaches a completely different world than a Dutch speaker of English and German. The point is to see the shape of yours, whichever direction your own languages send you.

Questions people ask

What counts as reach?

It's the total speaker population across every country and region where your selected languages are spoken, plus the geographic area those languages cover. The count combines real native-speaker numbers with an estimate of multilingual people who use the language as a second or third language. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue. Country populations come from open census and UN data.

Which language gets me the most reach?

It depends on what you already speak. For someone starting from only English, Mandarin usually adds the largest count of new speakers, Spanish stretches across the most geography, and Hindi or Urdu covers most of South Asia. Change the starting set and the answer changes. That's the reason to plug your own languages in and see what's left.

How do I save my selections?

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