Countries by Languages without English, French and Spanish (with Map)
Can you guess every country by typing in a spoken language in the country, that is not English, French or Spanish?
Using different sources such as WorldAtlas or Wikipedia. Access: April 2024
Click the map to zoom
When there is no other official language, regional, minority and indigenous languages are included. In other cases, minority languages are included when it's spoken by more than 5% of the population. Sign Languages are excluded.
Please note that exceptions were made, as it is difficult to draw a clear line between languages, dialects and language families. For some countries, the name of the language family is accepted, whereas "Germanic" for example, is not accepted.
I don't get the logic behind this. Why Corsican should be acceptable for France, but not Basque or Breton or Occitan, for example. Why Garifuna should be a correct answer for Honduras, but not for Belize. Are you doing "spoken languages", as you've written, or "official languages", as in the link. You seem to have wavered somewhere between the two.
I'll see, I made the exception to include non official languages for countries with only English, Spanish and French as their official language. That's why Corsican was added, I'm not sure why I left out Basque. I might add more languages to the quiz to make it less frustrating, which I apologize for.
I'm sure I guessed Portuguese as I got Portugal correct (and can't name another language spoken there) but I was not given Colombia or Andorra as correct answers despite Portuguese supposedly being correct.
It turns out it should have worked, portuguese would have been an answer for Andorra. I had a discussion on the JetPunk Discord and it seems like there is a bug regarding type-ins, which was the reason why some other languages didn't work here. I apologize for the inconvenience, it should now be fixed.
There are some very suspect choices making this quiz much less enjoyable than it otherwise would be. For example, you accept (only) the national languages for the DRC, and not even the commonly-used alternate names for them. (Kongo for Kikongo, for example).
In France, you take Provencal (dialect), but not Occitan (language), but in Spain, Occitan suddenly IS a language again?
In Venezuela, you ignore all native languages, which have some official recognition in the country, for VSL, which does not.
You seem to believe that Tamazight is the name of all Berber languages. It can be used to refer to them, but typing any specific Berber language is not accepted in most (all?) cases. You can type "Berber".. but why is Tuareg not acceptable in Mali, for example?
All of this can be checked by googling "languages of X (country)" and reading wikipedia articles for a few minutes, and I'm certain there are a lot more things I personally did not flag as probably wrong, so that's not ideal.
I'm also not entirely sold on having "creole" accept all of the various creoles except for the ones which are called creole but IN the creole (Krio, Kriol, Patois, etc). Personally, I'd just have it work for all of them.
The fundamental idea of the quiz seems sound, and interests me a lot, but it definitely could use some time and refinement on a lot of particulars.
The approach of accepting unofficial languages spoken in a country creates all kinds of problems. It would be better to just black out countries whose official languages are limited to English, Spanish, or French, and let us just solve for the rest. If you stick to official languages, you've got a nice bright line of demarcation for the answers. Accepting "Italian" for the US just seems silly. There are no communities where people exclusively speak Italian here anymore. Sure, there are some Italian speakers, but surely 99% of them speak English. The whole concept just gets so murky. Black out the likes of the US, Canada, France, etc., and just let us fill in the rest of the map. That is the best approach.
There *are* communities in the US where people exclusively speak Norwegian and Danish and German. I don't know about any Italian ones personally, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are. It's a big place.
Ideally the language needs to get some governmental recognition, rather than just "is spoken", but there are plenty of languages with governmental recognition in various countries which are still not considered an official language. Besides which, that doesn't address countries who never actually declared an official language, like, for example, the US.
Perhaps more to the point, being able to speak another language should not disqualify a different language from any kind of status. Would you disqualify Irish as an official language simply because 99% of its speakers also speak English?
I think you should add more languages on here and remove some in Europe. I don't think places like Czechia should have Vietnamese for answers, as only an extremely small minority actually speak it.
Also, some large languages aren't included. For EG, I would add Fang, Bambara and Maninka for Mali, At least Tsonga for Mozambique, Khoekhoe and Herero for Namibia, maybe Warao for Venezuela, and maybe at least one aboriginal language for Australia (something like Dhuwal).
This is a really solid concept that I really like! I agree with other comments that the languages included should be languages with some sort of government recognition in cases where the only official languages are English, French, or Spanish. There should also be more than Tamazight for Mali.
note: for some reason, tok pisin does not work for papua new guinea
Edit: I added your suggestions.
I think in France both Catalan and Arabian should work.
In France, you take Provencal (dialect), but not Occitan (language), but in Spain, Occitan suddenly IS a language again?
In Venezuela, you ignore all native languages, which have some official recognition in the country, for VSL, which does not.
You seem to believe that Tamazight is the name of all Berber languages. It can be used to refer to them, but typing any specific Berber language is not accepted in most (all?) cases. You can type "Berber".. but why is Tuareg not acceptable in Mali, for example?
All of this can be checked by googling "languages of X (country)" and reading wikipedia articles for a few minutes, and I'm certain there are a lot more things I personally did not flag as probably wrong, so that's not ideal.
The fundamental idea of the quiz seems sound, and interests me a lot, but it definitely could use some time and refinement on a lot of particulars.
Ideally the language needs to get some governmental recognition, rather than just "is spoken", but there are plenty of languages with governmental recognition in various countries which are still not considered an official language. Besides which, that doesn't address countries who never actually declared an official language, like, for example, the US.
Perhaps more to the point, being able to speak another language should not disqualify a different language from any kind of status. Would you disqualify Irish as an official language simply because 99% of its speakers also speak English?
Antigua and Barbuda: Antiguan and Barbudan Creole
Also, some large languages aren't included. For EG, I would add Fang, Bambara and Maninka for Mali, At least Tsonga for Mozambique, Khoekhoe and Herero for Namibia, maybe Warao for Venezuela, and maybe at least one aboriginal language for Australia (something like Dhuwal).