Second language use worldwide

Here is an interesting infographic about second language use worldwide from the Business Insider site.

It doesn't distinguish between:

• Official languages used nationally (e.g. Swedish in Finland).
• Regional languages that are not used throughout the country (e.g. Catalan and Kurdish in Spain and Turkey).
• Recent immigrant languages (e.g. Polish in the UK).

It also shows Belerusian (sic) as a second language in Belarus, which is surprising. According to Wikipedia Belarusian is the national language and Russian has official status.

Comments

[John Cowan]

Debunking at Languagehat of the European map (in the comments). The short version is that it's a mess, and meant to be amusing (or outrageous), not factual.