I'm helping out a bit on the IA of ourmedia.org, and I'm trying to come up with a list of common languages. These will be expanded later. It's tricky - the list I finally came up with is just a list - WARNING: please don't use this list for your project if you need common languages - it is fairly arbitrary.
It's pretty hard to come up with a list of languages for a project like this. We want to allow anyone to upload stuff in any language, but we also wanted to have a short-ish list of languages (20 to 40) instead of just using the really long one (a decision that's not necessarily the right one, but it was taken).
We didn't have time to take into account which languages are producing more media that's likely to be uploaded to ourmedia.org, or any factors like that. So this list is mostly based on the amount of speakers these languages have, with some preference for European languages (target audience in terms of computer access right now).
- Top 10 Common Languages by amount of native speakers
- The UN uses these main languages on their website: English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish.
This is the list I came up with, alphabetically. Users can use this to indicate the language of their media, and other things, or choose another language.
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
Dutch
English
French
German
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Korean
Marathi
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Tamil
Telugu
Turkish
Urdu
Vietnamese
Again, don't just use this list if you need common languages. It's very arbitrary and it took me less than an hour to put this together. I share it here as a starting point only.
Please leave comments!