Speakers per language diagram & International Linguistics Olympiad memes

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Hello readers of Humans Who Read Grammars,

As well as writing on this blog, I also work with the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL*). The IOL is a contest for students of secondary school from all over the world where they get to compete in solving linguistic puzzles. Normally in order to explain what the contest is all about I send people to the page with old problem sets, but there's a hip IOL-meme page that's produced some very apt memes that may do a better job at explaining the contest to linguists. I'll paste them in below. (Remember how we started as a meme-based blog for typologists?)

I recently made a post on our blog over there about the dominance of European countries in the contest and language diversity. For that post, I derived a little data visualisation of speaker populations per language (based on the 19th edition of Ethnologue) with infogram. I thought y'all might like it as well, so I'm sharing it here too.

By the way, if you're a linguist who'd like to help keep the contest strong and encourage clever youngsters to get into linguistics, get in touch! There's a lot of countries where there is no contest, or where the contest could well do with some help in thinking of clever problems based on small languages, lecturing etc. Talk to us and we'll figure something out.
Here is a table from Ethnologue that tries to explain this as well, a bit niftier but perhaps less pretty.
Table from Ethnologue summarising the number of speakers per language.




* Yes, the International Linguistics Olympiad is abbreviated "IOL". It's a thing about neutrality, don't worry about it.

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