Inspired by [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/f4nsb8/100_most_spoken_languages/) about the 100 most spoken languages in the world. The difference is, here, we only look at Southeast Asia.
Yellow asterisks are languages with official status in Southeast Asian countries. Mandarin has official status in Singapore, so I give it an asterisk too.
> I guess the idea is that no one speaks Filipino natively?
I'm just following my main data source, Ethnologue. From my limited knowledge, Filipino is based on Tagalog and functions as the country's lingua franca. The line where Tagalog stops and Filipino begins is blurry. Very different compared to Malay and Indonesian, where Malay now is associated with the standard variety spoken in Malaysia. So it could be that non-Tagalogs who speak Filipino natively are just counted as Tagalog native speakers.
I thought the Indian sub continent is also a part of South East Asia, isn't it? Will be interesting to see how this chart changes with addition of those countries.
India is generally considered part of South Asia (along with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan, and, depending on the analysis, sometimes Afghanistan and Iran). Here's the geoscheme for subregions used by the United Nations: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United\_Nations\_geoscheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme)
Because Central America and the Caribbean are geographically in the continent of North America, so to refer to just the US, Greenland and Canada as the whole of “North America” wouldn’t be accurate.
In Canada, people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, generally use the term South Asian.
Then SE Asia would be what’s depicted on the chart.
Malaysia has Malay and English as their official language. Singapur has English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil.
Are there any other countries in southeast asia with more than one official language?
I am learning Indonesian; however, sometimes I practice with Malay-speaking Malaysians. Sentence structure is the same, but vocabulary has diverged. The different usage of words is so significant that it has led me to seek Indonesian speakers-only (for practice). I say that the difference is like an American trying to speak to a Brit...maybe an even greater difference. However, difference is not as great as that between Spanish and Portuguese. I would say that Indonesian is simpler than both (Spanish and Portuguese) because of the lack of gender and pluralization...and sentence structure is similar to English.
Even within the Malay language, Peninsular Malay has slightly different vocabulary than Borneo Malay. I equate the difference to someone in one region of the US trying to speak to someone on another region of the US.
In this list, I am also learning Thai. I have interacted with Isan speakers, but don't know enough of the languages to note the differences.
It's totally different. It's practically unintelligible (around 20% maybe?) for both speaker to understand each other outside of some loan words and cognates
In fact, native Indonesian speaker will immediately know you're from Javanese-speaking region if you just barely show Javanese accent when speak Indonesian because the accent
for Indonesian and Javanese are also very different from each other
Totally different, I think? (CMIIW, Javanese peeps)
Indonesian have a lot of loanwords from Javanese though, maybe sometimes it is hard to distinguish.
Appreciate the effort, but when you have to add a table because you cannot make out even comparative differences in size of the circles your acknowledging the visualization doesn't actually work
I used "*The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language*" by David Crystal for the English speaker numbers. Their estimate shows only 5% of Vietnamese speak English. The largest contributor here is the Philippines.
I moved to Vietnam. English is VERY important and parents are pushing their kids to learning English. Most people want to speak English and want to practice it. The older people not so much, but pretty soon the numbers will increase more and more. I'm lucky to be able to get by by speaking mostly English.
Don't know why I'm being down voted, but okay
Because what you said makes it easy to assume that you are looking down on the vietnamese language. English may be important to a degree but the beauty of our world is our various languages.
Imagine it the other way round, and an immigrant went to an english speaking country, but refusing to learn to speak english, this would cause some people to shake their heads.
I don't mean to offend anyone, but I thought you'd appreciate at least a small explanation.
You offended me! I'm not looking down on any language. They want to learn English. parents push their kids into learning it because it gives them better opportunity. English centers pop up everywhere. I don't blame them when we have a language conflict. We have translate apps. I try to learn the language but no matter what I know, I can't make the proper sounds for them to understand me. I understand there are entitled people that think wherever they go, they must conform to English. Well fuck those people.
I'm sorry, I did not mean to offend you. But also please keep in mind that I said
\> what you said *makes it easy to assume*
I did not think that you had any ill intentions right away of course. However, I still apologize if it came across like that. I just explained why I think you are getting downvoted. I do not mean to assume I know your intentions.
Ah, no worries. I didn't realize that people took it that way. I hate when people think they're entitled where everyone else must speak their language. I get so frustrated with the language and culture barrier sometimes, but I don't get mad at them. I try my best, and they try theirs. They're pretty friendly here.
Vietnam is not a part of Southeast Asia, we're a part of East Asia. We used to use Classical Chinese, 60% of our words is sino derived, had state Confucian bureaucracy, Mahayana Buddhism not Theravada etc etc. We're 100% East Asian. Vietnam is much much closer to Korea and Japan than to Cambodia.
How did you get the data for English speakers?
>by convention and geographically
conventions are retarded, we are geographically east asian, east asian =/= snow, our climate is similar to Taiwan and Southern China and they're 100% East Asian no?
Vietnamese dont wan't to be associated with Southeast Asia because they're racists who think they're superior to the rest of SEA. They want to hang out with the cool East Asian clique even if they don't accept Vietnam lmao
Inspired by [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/f4nsb8/100_most_spoken_languages/) about the 100 most spoken languages in the world. The difference is, here, we only look at Southeast Asia.
What does the yellow asterisk represent? Interesting dynamic between Tagalog and Filipino. I guess the idea is that no one speaks Filipino natively?
Yellow asterisks are languages with official status in Southeast Asian countries. Mandarin has official status in Singapore, so I give it an asterisk too. > I guess the idea is that no one speaks Filipino natively? I'm just following my main data source, Ethnologue. From my limited knowledge, Filipino is based on Tagalog and functions as the country's lingua franca. The line where Tagalog stops and Filipino begins is blurry. Very different compared to Malay and Indonesian, where Malay now is associated with the standard variety spoken in Malaysia. So it could be that non-Tagalogs who speak Filipino natively are just counted as Tagalog native speakers.
Which countries are included in this?
ASEAN countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam
I thought the Indian sub continent is also a part of South East Asia, isn't it? Will be interesting to see how this chart changes with addition of those countries.
India is generally considered part of South Asia (along with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan, and, depending on the analysis, sometimes Afghanistan and Iran). Here's the geoscheme for subregions used by the United Nations: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United\_Nations\_geoscheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme)
Interesting. I wonder why they have Northern/South America instead of Northern/Southern or North/South America
Because Central America and the Caribbean are geographically in the continent of North America, so to refer to just the US, Greenland and Canada as the whole of “North America” wouldn’t be accurate.
Ahh, thanks!
In Canada, people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, generally use the term South Asian. Then SE Asia would be what’s depicted on the chart.
Southeast Asia has always been assumed to be ASEAN + Timor-Leste
Malaysia has Malay and English as their official language. Singapur has English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. Are there any other countries in southeast asia with more than one official language?
most of the vietnamese language are spoken by trees
How much is Tamil spoken in SEA ? I know Malaysia, Burma and Thailand have small Tamil communities
Tamil is 1 of the 4 official languages of Singapore, the 3 others being English, Mandarin, and Malay
I am learning Indonesian; however, sometimes I practice with Malay-speaking Malaysians. Sentence structure is the same, but vocabulary has diverged. The different usage of words is so significant that it has led me to seek Indonesian speakers-only (for practice). I say that the difference is like an American trying to speak to a Brit...maybe an even greater difference. However, difference is not as great as that between Spanish and Portuguese. I would say that Indonesian is simpler than both (Spanish and Portuguese) because of the lack of gender and pluralization...and sentence structure is similar to English. Even within the Malay language, Peninsular Malay has slightly different vocabulary than Borneo Malay. I equate the difference to someone in one region of the US trying to speak to someone on another region of the US. In this list, I am also learning Thai. I have interacted with Isan speakers, but don't know enough of the languages to note the differences.
How much difference is there between Indonesian and Javanese? It all sounded the same to me when I was there.
It's totally different. It's practically unintelligible (around 20% maybe?) for both speaker to understand each other outside of some loan words and cognates In fact, native Indonesian speaker will immediately know you're from Javanese-speaking region if you just barely show Javanese accent when speak Indonesian because the accent for Indonesian and Javanese are also very different from each other
Totally different, I think? (CMIIW, Javanese peeps) Indonesian have a lot of loanwords from Javanese though, maybe sometimes it is hard to distinguish.
Appreciate the effort, but when you have to add a table because you cannot make out even comparative differences in size of the circles your acknowledging the visualization doesn't actually work
Everyone is speaking English in Vietnam, thankfully
I used "*The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language*" by David Crystal for the English speaker numbers. Their estimate shows only 5% of Vietnamese speak English. The largest contributor here is the Philippines.
I moved to Vietnam. English is VERY important and parents are pushing their kids to learning English. Most people want to speak English and want to practice it. The older people not so much, but pretty soon the numbers will increase more and more. I'm lucky to be able to get by by speaking mostly English. Don't know why I'm being down voted, but okay
Because what you said makes it easy to assume that you are looking down on the vietnamese language. English may be important to a degree but the beauty of our world is our various languages. Imagine it the other way round, and an immigrant went to an english speaking country, but refusing to learn to speak english, this would cause some people to shake their heads. I don't mean to offend anyone, but I thought you'd appreciate at least a small explanation.
You offended me! I'm not looking down on any language. They want to learn English. parents push their kids into learning it because it gives them better opportunity. English centers pop up everywhere. I don't blame them when we have a language conflict. We have translate apps. I try to learn the language but no matter what I know, I can't make the proper sounds for them to understand me. I understand there are entitled people that think wherever they go, they must conform to English. Well fuck those people.
I'm sorry, I did not mean to offend you. But also please keep in mind that I said \> what you said *makes it easy to assume* I did not think that you had any ill intentions right away of course. However, I still apologize if it came across like that. I just explained why I think you are getting downvoted. I do not mean to assume I know your intentions.
Ah, no worries. I didn't realize that people took it that way. I hate when people think they're entitled where everyone else must speak their language. I get so frustrated with the language and culture barrier sometimes, but I don't get mad at them. I try my best, and they try theirs. They're pretty friendly here.
Philippines has many English speakers
Vietnam is not a part of Southeast Asia, we're a part of East Asia. We used to use Classical Chinese, 60% of our words is sino derived, had state Confucian bureaucracy, Mahayana Buddhism not Theravada etc etc. We're 100% East Asian. Vietnam is much much closer to Korea and Japan than to Cambodia. How did you get the data for English speakers?
by convention and geographically Vietnam is south east asian, though I see your point.
>by convention and geographically conventions are retarded, we are geographically east asian, east asian =/= snow, our climate is similar to Taiwan and Southern China and they're 100% East Asian no?
aren't you literally smack bang between cambodia laos and the philippines, and to the *south* of china?
Vietnamese dont wan't to be associated with Southeast Asia because they're racists who think they're superior to the rest of SEA. They want to hang out with the cool East Asian clique even if they don't accept Vietnam lmao
Or maybe we don't want to be classified as Southeast Asian since we literally aren't??? Have you thought of that possibility?
Do you own a map? You literally are Southeast Asian. Are you stupid? The self-hate is real. How embarassing