Overview
I’ve implemented pointlessly excessive localization in my poker app, “Exotic Poker.” Generally speaking, English is the common language of poker, and depending on the casino or tournament, communication in languages other than English may even be prohibited to prevent cheating. Therefore, there shouldn’t be any particular problem with implementing a poker app in English, but perhaps when you’re doing something as a hobby, you just end up wanting to do things that serve no real purpose. I’ve set myself a pointless goal: to conquer every language that can be translated using Google Translate or DeepL. In the process, I created a list of languages, and since it might be useful to someone, I’m posting it here on this blog.
While I’m posting the list, I’ll share a few interesting tidbits.
Population Distribution
Looking at the population distribution of languages, it makes sense that English, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi are so prevalent given the size of their respective countries. What’s surprising, however, is that Spanish and Portuguese have such large populations. This seems to stem from the fact that Spanish is the most widely used official language in Mexico, and Portuguese is the most widely used official language in Brazil. In terms of population alone, Bengali (Bangladesh) and Urdu (Pakistan) also have large numbers of speakers, but since these are economically poor regions, they may not be languages that are widely studied in developed countries.
Incidentally, when I run out of topics for this blog, I post songs randomly generated by Suno AI. Apparently, over 90% of the natural language used in music is English. Spanish ranks second, and these two languages together cover over 95% of the market. Based on the size of the music market, Japanese and Korean follow next, while Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese seem to be minor languages in the music industry.
Languages Written from Right to Left
There are several languages that are written from right to left, a specification that is a nightmare for system developers. The prime example is Arabic. Other Middle Eastern languages, such as Persian and Urdu, also fall into this category. Jewish languages such as Hebrew and Yiddish are also included in this category. Accordingly, it seems natural to reverse the left-right layout of UI elements on the screen. However, since the positions of UI components are reversed compared to other languages, it can be confusing when testing or using the app. I have implemented this in my own app, but I’m not sure if the layout feels natural to users of these languages (I suspect it probably doesn’t).
Languages Written Vertically
In addition to the languages listed above, there are several languages written vertically. These include Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Mongolian, and it appears that Taiwan also has a culture of vertical writing. However, China seems to have a policy of standardizing official documents to be written horizontally, so vertical writing may eventually become a culture limited to classical texts (Classical Chinese). In Japan, vertical writing is used in newspapers, novels, and Japanese language textbooks, so it may be the most prominent country where vertical writing is used in daily life. Although Mongolian uses the Cyrillic alphabet—the same script as Russian—and is typically written horizontally, it seems that the culture of vertical writing persists because the Mongolian script is also taught in schools.
Why Languages Vary by Country
Since the language spoken by a nation’s people represents their national identity, each country and government has a strong incentive to preserve its own language, and it is common practice to educate citizens to speak their native tongue rather than a foreign language. This is likely why even languages with only a few hundred thousand speakers refuse to conform to other countries’ languages and strive to maintain their own distinct identity.
It seems this is also why, even in diplomatic settings, people often deliver speeches in their native language even if they are fluent in a foreign language. Consequently, a language with only a few hundred thousand speakers is not necessarily at risk of extinction. Conversely, there are languages with tens of millions of speakers that are rarely used in everyday communication (with major languages like English being used instead) and are at risk of becoming dead languages. For example, the Hunslück language apparently originated in Luxembourg, but while it is virtually a dead language in Europe, it is reportedly used in certain regions of Brazil, where the number of speakers is estimated to be in the millions. When politics and customs are involved, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by rationality alone, and perhaps that is what makes linguistics so fascinating.
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