Technical Notes
The map shows the proportion of all people who speak Vietnamese as a first language that live in that territory in 2005, but removes the countries where Vietnamese is dominant. This map therefore only shows 3.2% of all speakers of Vietnamese. The territory omitted is Viet Nam.
The colour shading indicates the major geographic regions of the world used in all Worldmapper cartograms (see reference map).
Definition
The maps in the 2005 language data series are made from data on the number of people speaking a language as their first-language, that is the language they would use at home.
Data sources
This map uses data several sources, the main one being Ethnologue (15th Edition, 2005). Estimating the number of speakers of a language is fraught with difficulty on several levels (last accessed January 2009). We aim to map as complete data as possible and therefore estimate data for missing values. The language numbers we use and publish are rough estimates, and should not be taken as definitive. In some cases, missing data for very small territories is not used in the cartogram and that area is therefore omitted in the map.
All modifications to the original data source are noted in our data sheets.
Download data file