Languages By GDP

Came across a very interesting chart over here:

 

 

“This short article provides one picture of the economic significance of different languages, with a breakdown of the percentages of world GDP by language. Not only does it show the current breakdown, but it also provides data for the years 1975 to 2002 to show modern trends. The most notable feature is the steady rise of Chinese and slow relative decline of Japanese and most European languages. Korean and Indic languages also show growth over that period, though slower than Chinese.”

 

Now here’s the same chart over the period 2003-2010 (projected from 2003):

 

 

More current data can be found here:

 

Total GDP per language area in 2008 in billion US dollars at market exchange rates (as a % of world GDP in parenthesis) >> population in 2008 (UN figures for the countries and territories making up each language area, not the actual number of speakers) :

 

1- English: 19,837+ (32.6%+) >> 481.7 million+

2- Chinese: 5,210 (8.6%) >> 1,358.1 million

3- Japanese: 4,924 (8.1%) >> 127.2 million

4- German: 4,504 (7.4%) >> 96.4 million

5- Spanish: 4,364 (7.2%) >> 416.8 million

6- French: 4,097 (6.7%) >> 426.7 million

7- Italian: 2,332 (3.8%) >> 60.3 million

8- Russian: 1,959 (3.2%) >> 189.0 million

9- Arabic: 1,914 (3.1%) >> 342.1 million

10- Portuguese: 1,913 (3.1%) >> 249.2 million

11- Dutch: 1,267 (2.1%) >> 24.6 million

12- Korean: 973 (1.6%) >> 72.2 million

13- Malay-Indonesian: 931 (1.5%) >> 263.7 million

14- Turkish: 729 (1.2%) >> 71.5 million

15- Hindi-Urdu: 570 (0.9%) >> 720.8 million

 

And perhaps the most interesting of all, GDP by number of speakers:

 

GDP per capita per language area (at market exchange rates):

Dutch: 51,466 US dollars

German: 46,703

Japanese: 38,722

Italian: 38,699

Korean: 13,472

Spanish: 10,471

Russian: 10,365

Turkish: 10,200

French: 9,602

Portuguese: 7,676

Arabic: 5,596

Chinese: 3,836

Malay-Indonesian: 3,530

Hindi-Urdu: 791

 

I’ve been saying all along that the Netherlands was awesome. Sort of surprised to see Italian so high up, though.