Language diagram

Next time my father asks why I studied Chinese in college instead of his native language, spoken by a whopping five million people, I'll show him this graph in which it's represented by a teeny dot under Portuguese. Their numbers for Finnish are off by a couple of million, a rounding error for the leviathan that is Mandarin, but in Finland that's about the equivalent of only counting the U.S. population east of the Mississippi. Despite a few data glitches, graphs are my new favorite toy so there's lots to play with on this site.