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.
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.
Posted by: John Cowan | 05/11/2014 at 00:42