World Cup - breakdown by languages

I was pretty amused that Group H has 3 Spanish-speaking countries, Spain and two of its former possessions: Honduras and Chile.

But what about the World Cup as a whole. Well. here's a breakdown. N.B. where there is a clash between the 'official' language and the majority language, I have gone with the majority language (but put the official language in brackets).

Arabic
Algeria

Danish
Denmark

Dutch
Netherlands

English
Nigeria
England
United States
Australia
Ghana
Cameroon*
New Zealand

French
France
Cameroon*
Ivory Coast

German
Germany
Switzerland

Greek
Greece

Italian
Italy

Japanese
Japan

Korean
South Korea
North Korea

Portuguese
Brazil
Portugal

Serbian
Serbia

Slovak
Slovakia

Slovene
Slovenia

Spanish
Mexico
Uruguay
Argentina
Paraguay
Spain
Honduras
Chile

Zulu
South Africa (most widely spoken, but there are eleven official languages)


Cameroon speaks both English and French. Switzerland has a tonne of languages but German is the most widely spoken.

So here are the totals

Spanish 7
English 6½
French 2½
German 2
Portuguese 2
Korean 2
Arabic 1
Danish 1
Dutch 1
Greek 1
Italian 1
Japanese 1
Serbian 1
Slovak 1
Slovene 1
Zulu 1

So Spanish just edging ahead there, thanks to my frustrating decision to give Cameroon a 'half' point split over two countries. Don't blame me, blame Cameroon.

My recent blog post on Three Men on a Blog was also about the World Cup.

Read it, if you haven't already.

Also, I decided to do a scheduled publishing of this post at 4am 18th June, at which point I'm pretty likely to be asleep. Is just so I can leave an arbitrary gap between one post and another.