Spanish designer Alberto Lucas López created this gorgeous infographic that shows the proportion of native speakers of each major language.
López is currently Senior Graphics Editor at National Geographic. He says:
There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people. We represent each language within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country. The colour of these countries shows how languages have taken root in many different regions.
• Mother tongues (via Taxi)