All good things must come to an end… and so must the World Cup! After almost a month of competition and a lot of surprises, the final game will take place this Sunday 15th at the Loujniki Stadium in Moscow (starting at 4pm BST).
Our area of expertise (as surprising as it may seem) isn’t football, but languages. That’s why we organised our own the Languages World Cup! Here’s a recap (click to enlarge):
8 languages selected for the Languages World Cup
For this unprecedented competition, we picked 8 languages represented at the FIFA World Cup : Arabic, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. 5 facts & figures allowed us to rank the languages:
- Languages with the most native speakers (in millions)
- Number of World Cups won by countries that speak this language
- Number of national teams speaking this language that have qualified for this World Cup
- Number of Ballon d’Ors won by football players speaking this language
- Number of countries in which this language is the or one of the official language(s)
Even if the rythm of our own World Cup wasn’t as intense as in Russia, we still had a couple of great languages games, for instance Portuguese beating French 3 to 2! Some wins were also confirmed in the real competition: Uruguay won against Egypt during the group phase, just like the Spanish language won against the Arabic language (final score: 1-0 for football, 4-1 for languages!)
In any case, congratulations to the French team that won yesterday night against Belgium, and good luck to England and Croatia for tonight!
